Was this the best speech of the year in the Michigan Legislature?

Brandon Dillon, the odd-duck Democratic legislator in the solidly Republican Grand Rapids area, has emerged as one of the top Democrats in the Capitol. The MIRS newsletter named Dillon one of the top five Democrats in the Legislature for 2012, and much of his sudden fame arises from his remarks on the House floor during the lame-duck session against the right-to-work bill. Some are calling it the best speech of the year in the Legislature.

The representative made his case against the bill and the process perfectly clear: “Good ideas get debated, and bad ones get rammed through with police protection in a lame-duck Legislature.”

Here are a few excerpts:

“… I always thought that the place I came from had a basic sense of fairness and personal responsibility, and with this bill allowing people to benefit from the hard work that others do without personally having to sacrifice one penny is the very epitome of freeloading, that’s what it is. It allows people to take advantage of other people, that’s what we are voting on today.

“… The people here don’t have the guts to talk about this, in front of people in this state. That’s shameful, that’s not democracy. This is where democracy goes to die today, because the (Republican) majority in this state, who lost 52% of the vote in state House races does not have the guts to defend this.

Proposal 2 was defeated on the November ballot, he said, but at least those behind the pro-union proposition “had the common courtesy to take it to the voters. They got beat fair and square. Why can’t you (Republicans) take this to the voters? Because you know what will happen. You’re doing this in the lame duck because you know next session you won’t have the votes. This is an outrage. And anybody in this chamber who is willing to vote for a bill that changes the precedent in this state of such consequence, without even allowing us to offer a real amendment, does not deserve to be here.”

The speech is all over YouTube but it appears that only Lybio.net has the full text.