The continuing news blackout from Washington makes me uneasy. One gets the sense, during this journalistic state of siege, that important things are being decided in the cloakrooms of Capitol Hill and in dark corners of the federal bureaucracy. Yet out here, in Chicagoland, we can only guess what those things might be.
Or maybe you thought Janet Reno’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee was the most important thing that happened last week in Washington. (It was not.) Maybe you were bowled over the week before by the breathless exchange between former presidential aide Harold Ickes and the GOP senators out to embarrass President Bill Clinton about his fishy fundraising. (Yawn.)
No, for my money, there are far more important things taking place in the nation’s capital this autumn and they have nothing to do with Bill Clinton’s home movies, Vice President Al Gore’s choice of telephones or how many times somebody named John Huang visits the White House.
To you these revelations may be important and that’s understandable. We all swim in the same media ocean and for weeks these political soap operas have dominated the front pages, led the evening news and filled the weekend TV panel shows.
Me, I could care less. I am, you see, a beyond-the-beltway bumpkin. My world view is hopelessly limited by personal and parochial concerns.
Like my basement. It doesn’t get water very often, but I sure wish Congress would get around to approving, and paying its share of those big reservoirs that are supposed to drain the rainwater from my cellar via the Deep Tunnels. Does anyone know how the Army Corps of Engineers is leaning on that one? Or what the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is doing with the appropriation? If so, please write.
Then there’s the Stevenson Expressway. I live north so it’s not that big a thing with me, but I’d hate to see my southwest friends, from Pilsen to Plainfield, stuck with four years of lane closures instead of just two. Whether to fund an expedited rebuild of the Stevenson was one of the matters before Congress before the news blackout hit. Maybe some staffer from the relevant congressional committee could call and let me know how it turned out.
I do, however, travel Lake Shore Drive and take my kids to the Lincoln Park Zoo and the lakefront museums. So I worry that the level of Lake Michigan is again on the rise, lapping at our civic doorstep as we head into the winter storm season. Worry because the 11-mile sea wall that protects Lincoln Park and Lake Shore Drive from being washed away is itself washing away and in desperate need of repair. Last thing I heard, Congress and the Army Corps, which were supposed to pay for half the cost of a rebuild, still were quibbling over least-cost alternatives. Is Clark Street about to become the new Lake Shore Drive? If and when the news blackout lifts, we may find out.
In fact, I’ve begun keeping a list of things we Chicagoans will want to know as soon as the Janet Reno crisis concludes and before the next beltway blowup begins. Who knows? Maybe the news wires will clear long enough–before, say, the opening arguments in the Paula Jones/Bill Clinton sex harassment trial–so we mopes back here in Dullsville can find out about the things that actually impact our poor lives.
You might have your own list, but I’d like to know stuff like:
Did the Department of Veterans Affairs (formerly known as the VA) ever decide which of its two Chicago hospitals to close–West Side or Lakeside? Before the blackout, there was a heck of a high-power, behind-the-scenes lobbying fight going on between Rush-Presbyterian and Northwestern Memorial Hospitals to see which would lose/keep their VA-funded physician training.
Also on the subject of health care, I wonder which Chicago-area hospitals will go under because of the big Medicare and Medicaid cutbacks approved in last spring’s balanced-budget agreement? And what are the restrictions the Department of Health and Human Services has put on Illinois’ share of the federal agency’s new $24 billion program to help uninsured kids?
And is it true that Congress is pushing through a bill, called the Internet Tax Freedom Act, that would exempt cyberspace transactions from local sales taxes . . . and punch a hole in the municipal budgets of Chicago and hundreds of its suburbs? Or that the fast-moving “takings” bill, recently introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), that would let developers sue in federal court the instant a city or suburb tries to block an unwanted project like a garbage dump or nightclub? Or a bill that would forbid the Census Bureau from estimating the number of people–typically poor immigrants in big cities–who are most definitely here but don’t come forward to be counted? That one alone would cost Chicago millions in population-based federal dollars. So much for Mayor Richard Daley’s recent promise of no new city taxes.
These things and worse are going on in Washington . . . or so I’ve been informed by my policy-wonk sources and my policy-wonk newsletters.
You, too, will eventually hear and read of these things, after the Whitewater-Huang-Reno-Jones-Foster-Riady-Lippo news blackout is over.
Of course, by then, it may be too late.
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