Republican State Rep. Ann Bollin can charge state taxpayers about $100 every time she drives back and forth to Lansing from her Brighton home. There is nothing in place to determine whether she actually makes the trips for which she’s reimbursed. She could be pocketing the money to purchase opioids for all we know.
There are actually no guardrails. None at all.
If every accusation is a confession, then perhaps Bollin is trying to tell us something. Earlier this week, without a scintilla of evidence, she told receptive GOP donors that those dirty Black hos in Detroit were taking taxpayer money intended for their babies and spending it on abortions. They were getting pregnant, she implied, solely to game the system.
“No income requirements, no guardrails, don’t even know how long they’ve lived in Michigan, you just say, ‘Hey, I’m signing up for this, I’m so and so and I’m pregnant’,” she said. “Then they can abort that baby, so they could collect months of this and then abort their baby, and they’ve got that money, or they get it for the first couple of months.”
There is not a shred of evidence that this is happening. As Michigan Advance reported, evidence shows that the money from Rx Kids actually encourages participants to keep their babies since they can afford necessities – food, diapers – required for parenthood. That is one reason why it’s supported by the Michigan Catholic Conference, an organization not known for a laissez-faire attitude toward abortion.
Bollin never called the recipients “hos,” nor did she mention the color of their skin. She didn’t have to. Republicans know what she means. She’s sticking it to those trashy, no-account, poor people who get the money that Democrats are taking from hard-working, decent Republicans.
In case anyone misses the subtleties, Republican House Speaker Mike Hall spelled it out last February. He said Democrats were using the program to entice immigrants to cross the border so that they could harvest their votes. By immigrants, Hall did not mean blonde, Swedish volleyball athletes seeking asylum. He was referring to brown-skinned invaders sneaking over southern borders so that they can vote for Democrats in Michigan. Never mind that such voting is illegal and virtually never happens.
House Republicans, then, are claiming that illegal immigrants are coming to America so that they can get pregnant, get an abortion, and vote illegally in Michigan. All for the $500 a month – minus the cost of the abortion, since there is no healthcare plan – they’ll claim for maybe 90 days. And, of course, if they get caught trying to vote, they will be deported.
During those 90 days, a lawmaker like Bollin could nick taxpayers for twice that much by claiming that she drove to Lansing three or four times a week. She can collect even if she never made the trips, which is not a hypothetical. The Detroit Free Press just revealed that numbers of Republican lawmakers did just that last December even though they all stayed home – fully paid – rather than show up in Lansing where Democrats were introducing bills they didn’t like.
Was Bollin among the culprits? No way to know because lawmakers of both stripes make it virtually impossible to track such abuses. There are, as Bollin would put it, no guardrails. She could have claimed the non-taxable mileage reimbursement without making a single car trip. She could have used the money for anything – her savings account, a new dress, opioids – and she didn’t even have to get an abortion. She didn’t even have to get pregnant.
And, even though it’s the job she’s paid by taxpayers to do, she didn’t even have to vote.
To read more of Rich Perlberg, check out his Substack.
