Michigan voters will have the opportunity next month to call for a new state constitutional convention. If voters approve, delegates to the convention would have a big job ahead of them. They should start with the basic question of “How is the state constitution doing?” For some portions, the answer is clearly, “Not well.”

Some of the clear and plain language of the Michigan Constitution is being ignored and has little impact on how government operates. Other provisions have failed to deliver on their intent. Delegates to a new convention would have an opportunity to fix these problems, and here are three sections of the constitution they could improve or remove.

• State debt authorization in Article IX, Section 15

As written, this provision lets the state borrow money, but only if two-thirds of both houses of the Legislature agree to the debt, and voters give their approval in a general election. This stringent requirement was designed to ensure that new debts have popular support from both the people and their representatives.

The intent of this provision is solid; the problem is that state government effectively ignores it. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued bonds to pay for road improvements in 2020, for instance, without a vote of the Legislature, let alone the approval of the people.

How is this possible, given the constitution’s clear requirements for taking on debt? Courts have ruled that the legislative and popular approval requirements only apply to bonds secured by the state’s full faith and credit. But that qualification is not in the constitutional language — the courts simply read it in. Delegates to a constitutional convention should ask whether they still want stringent debt authorization. If so, they ought to fix the language. If, instead, they think stringent requirements should only apply to general obligation debts, they should say so. And if they no longer feel like requiring supermajorities and popular support is a good idea, they should eliminate the section.

• Pension protection and funding requirements in Article IX, Section 24

When the delegates to our last constitutional convention added this provision, they said that government employees deserved the assurance that their pensions could not be rescinded based on political whim. Delegates also wanted to ensure that government employers were setting aside enough money to pay for pensions so that debts wouldn’t be kicked to future taxpayers.

“We believe this constitution must be a forward looking document; … that it must spell out for the future the manner in which these funds should be managed, so that our children will not, 50 years hence, suffer from the fact that we failed to put in enough money,” as one delegate put it.

It hasn’t worked. Government pension fund members are the state’s largest creditors. The school pension system — the largest pension system the state manages — has not had enough money saved to cover the costs of expected pensions in 49 of the past 50 years. Detroit’s largest creditors during the city’s 2013 bankruptcy proceedings were its pensioners. City officials had not saved enough to pay for their pensions, and employees’ pensions were cut as part of the bankruptcy process. This is the kind of problem Article IX, Section 24 was designed to avoid. Neither the security nor the funding mandate has worked, and delegates to a new convention ought to either figure out how to strengthen it or eliminate it.

• The effective date of legislation in Article IV, Section 27

If legislators want their bills to take effect when the governor signs them into law, they need to get two-thirds approval in both chambers. Yet, the practice in the House is to take a voice vote to determine whether a law should have immediate effect. That vote isn’t a roll call vote, meaning that whoever controls the House gavels on and declares sufficient support for immediate effect.

Legislative practices shouldn’t be contrary to plain constitutional language. If delegates don’t want require a supermajority vote for a law to have immediate effect, they can remove the section from the constitution. Otherwise, they ought to fix it.

The language regarding immediate effect, pensions and debt would not be the most debated provisions in a convention. Nor are they the most meaningful changes that a constitutional convention could make. But they’re exactly the kind of problems it could fix.

If voters were to approve a constitutional convention, there would be a lot of interest in some really important issues. But delegates also should review some less important provisions in the state constitution. Protections for existing pensions aren’t working. State debts get authorized even when officials don’t comply with stringent approval requirements. Immediate effect gets granted without supermajority approval. Delegates could and should either fix or abandon the provisions that address these situations.

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