I spent the better part of last Wednesday asking folks around the Statehouse if they had anything positive to tell me. I went looking for anything that might indicate a silver lining to this increasingly nasty spring legislative session.
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Mostly, people just laughed at me.
Other than some individual personal developments, there just wasn’t much positivity around. The governor’s chief of staff, Mike Zolnierowicz, and his incomparable wife, Barret, were about to have a new baby. They’re great people, and that’s wonderful news, but it also means that “Z” was not going to be able to work on solving the problems for a few days.
A gambling expansion bill appeared to be progressing. But I’m told Gov. Bruce Rauner is in no mood to sign it as long as his “Turnaround Agenda” is being ignored by the legislature’s majority Democrats.
The Senate Democrats, meanwhile, were expected to move legislation to help Chicago out of its horrific fiscal mess, but there’s still the problem with the governor’s refusal to do anything for the Democrats until he gets what he wants.
So, I came up with nothing.
Rauner’s list of demands has been whittled down, but he still isn’t backing off his insistence that the General Assembly give him at least some anti-union “right-to-work” local zones. He wants a “causation” standard for workers’ compensation and a property tax freeze, which even in watered-down forms continue to be a nonstarter.
His list of demands is still long, but Rauner is willing to support $3.5 billion in new revenue, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that he also wants the Democrats to agree to $3 billion in spending cuts. The governor’s folks thought they were being generous by offering more revenue than cuts, but the Democrats pointed out that getting their people to vote for both tax increases and huge spending cuts was pretty much impossible.
Instead, House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, announced Monday that the Democrats are ready to pass a spending plan that needs about $3 billion more in revenue to be balanced and are willing to work with the governor in providing the revenue to make the monster balance. In effect, the Democrats want to put the cutbacks on Rauner’s head and his head only.
It’s more likely that Rauner would simply veto the budget bill in its entirety and harangue the Democrats via a massive TV ad campaign for again producing an “irresponsibly unbalanced budget.”
And I’m hearing that when the clock strikes June 1, putting the legislative session into overtime, the governor’s list of 80 demands and concessions goes out the window. He will then put his entire agenda back on the table and withdraw all the concessions, including (and especially) much-needed new revenue.
So, in an admittedly desperate attempt to find something positive to write about, I maneuvered two people, one from each side, to a table last Wednesday night to see if they could hash out one little thing.
Take it from me, these guys are all talking past each other. They just don’t understand each other — although it did appear that the governor’s people were slightly more willing to cut a deal and they appeared to “get” the Democrats at least a bit more than the Dems appeared to “get” Rauner.
The Rauner folks know, at least somewhere deep down, that attacking unions is an existential issue for the Democratic Party. The Dems ain’t gonna move a millimeter on that one. But the Rauner camp has been pointing out that raising taxes is also a potentially existential issue for him and the GOP.
Rauner can’t break his promise to reform state government and the economy and then hand the majority party a gigantic tax increase. He will get slaughtered for that. Maybe the Democrats know that and want to force him to cut his political throat, or, being Democrats, they just don’t comprehend how tax-averse Rauner is.
But as long as he’s willing to go part way on raising revenue, the Democrats are going to try and push him to go the full boat.
And then I got home Wednesday night and read Rauner’s op-ed column in the State Journal-Register.
He wrote that “if legislators are willing to reform how we do business, they will find me an eager partner..If they are not, then they should expect a very long extra session because I will keep fighting for major reforms.”
Like I said, I got pretty much nothing in the way of good news. Sorry.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com
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