Madigan may be starting to lose his iron grip
The only can to get kicked down the road last week was Mike Madigan’s.
For three decades, the House speaker and Democratic state chairman has been Illinois’ most powerful politician.
Governors and other state officeholders come and go. Madigan stays.
In the history of the United States, no one has led a state legislative body longer than Mike Madigan. No one.
He is the personification of the old-time political boss. He demands strict adherence from legislators, and in return doles out campaign cash, committee assignments and, if they are really good in following his directives, Madigan might even allow their legislation to be voted upon.
He’s a shrewd, calculating politician who knows all the legislative maneuvers and rarely loses. What Mike Madigan really wants, he gets.
“Never bet against Mike Madigan” has become perhaps the most repeated axiom at the Illinois Statehouse in the many years I’ve been in Springfield.
So reporters, lawmakers and other political insiders were left rolling their eyes last Wednesday night when Madigan ludicrously claimed to have never pressured anyone to vote a particular way. It was theater of the absurd.
Madigan rules like a despot. If someone on rare occasion crosses him, it’s done with trepidation.
That’s why state Rep. Ken Dunkin’s actions last week were profound.
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Madigan needed all 71 of his Democratic House members to show up Wednesday and vote as one to override a major veto by Gov. Bruce Rauner.
The measure in question was a political gift to organized labor that could take Rauner out of contract negotiations with the largest union representing state employees — leaving the big decisions to an unelected arbitrator.
One member rose from a Chicago hospital bed and arrived in a wheelchair to answer Madigan’s call. Others canceled plans to make sure they were in Springfield for the important vote.
But not Dunkin, a Chicago Democrat. In an act of passive resistance, he declined to return early from a trip to New York and didn’t show up, leaving Madigan one vote short of the 71 needed to override Rauner’s veto.
He may as well have stuck his finger in the speaker’s eye.
And Dunkin’s move may well have emboldened two other members of Madigan’s membership to defect and not cast “yes” votes as well. The result was that the override attempt drew 68 votes, three shy of the magic number.
So Madigan lost. Big time. And you might not have been able to count the number of raised eyebrows in the Statehouse.
A fissure is developing in the speaker’s once-impregnable wall of obedience.
We saw hints of it last year when Madigan proposed and pushed for a “millionaire tax” to boost state revenue but failed to muster enough votes to put a referendum on the ballot.
But the Sept. 2 vote stands out because Madigan invested so much of his political capital into engineering an override and a rebuke to Rauner but instead manufactured a defeat.
Yes, Mike Madigan is still the most powerful politician in Illinois, but last week people began wondering whether the Madigan era is drawing to a close.
Scott Reeder is a veteran statehouse reporter and a journalist with the Illinois News Network, a project of the Illinois Policy Institute. He can be reached at [email protected]