May 7th, 2008
Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson on Wednesday said this year’s legislative session is likely to stretch well into the summer.
“I don’t see us getting more done in the next four weeks than we’ve done in the last five months,” Watson said during the Illinois Business Day luncheon in Springfield. “I don’t see a lot of meetings I don’t see a budget or much discussion there. It’s poison in the air, and that’s not conducive to getting things done. So I would expect to see us back here again in the summer.”
Listening to Watson talk to hundreds of business people, I couldn’t help but remember a goofy motivational banner in the hallway outside my U.S. history class.
It said, “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”
As the current legislative session wears on, it’s becoming more and more clear that lawmakers may not have learned the lessons from last year.
Last year, budget deliberations turned acrimonious early when the governor used his budget address to introduce controversial programs and revenue sources, and his method prompted his deteriorating relationships with lawmakers erode even faster. Infighting among the Democratic leaders in both chambers and the governor set the tone for the ensuing months of session, which some jokingly say never ended.
This year legislators will have to fight with declining revenue streams, rising unpaid bills and the desire to expand or start new programs as they hone in on the next budget. One audience member asked House Republican Leader Tom Cross why the state couldn’t just balance its budget by cutting government spending.
“It would be tough,” said Cross, who also spoke at the event. “You’re not going to cut your way out of it. … That is a component, but that will not solve the problem.”
Lawmakers will also have to struggle with growing distrust in Springfield.
“This dysfunction is starting to have real negative impacts on people’s lives,” Cross said. “No one trusts each other. … There are enough votes 71 and 36 to get these things done — not without kicking and screaming because they don’t like it but they know they need to do these things. I don’t think the issue is substance, it’s personality.”
As of Wednesday, the Legislature and the governor have 24 days to agree on a budget. This might be easy, but the key seems to be start talking about it.
Watson said the recent leaders’ meeting has focused on agreeing on a capital construction plan and not on the next budget. When attention does focus on the budget, it looks like the Legislature again might break from its traditions. Historically, the leaders and the governor meet and hash out one budget. Last year, the House and the Senate crafted their own budgets and this only made the already tense atmosphere more toxic. It appears a new method might make an encore presentation.
“The thought is the House might pass a budget over to the Senate. … There have not been any discussion between the leaders. The only meetings we’ve had are over capital,” Watson said.
The state Constitution says lawmakers must agree on a budget by May 31 to pass it with a simple majority of votes – that’s 60 in the House and 30 in the Senate.
And Watson said if that doesn’t happen, the process, “becomes more cumbersome to get things done.”
Cumbersome, indeed.
Starting on June 1, Republicans gain a seat at the table. The House Democrats are forced to woo their GOP colleagues in order to pass any bill, because each chamber now needs 71 votes, rather than 60. Unlike the House, Senate Democrats have the necessary 36 members to meet its raised threshold, and technically wouldn’t need Republican votes to pass anything if the Legislature misses the May deadline. But it’s hard to keep all of those ducks in a row, so any overtime session would also Senate Republicans a louder voice during negotiations.
Cross said citizens are beginning to see the true effects of Springfield’s infighting.
“Somewhere, somebody at the end of the day has to say, ‘You know what? I don’t like the guy in front of me. I don’t like him for a lot of reasons, he might have even lied to me, but at the end of the day, this is not about whether I like someone or not anymore,’” Cross said. “This is about the guy down the street who doesn’t have a job, (is) losing his house, losing his car … We’ve got to put aside our differences … We don’t like everybody. It’s human nature, but we’ve got to say enough and move forward.”
March 24th, 2008
Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s local politics blog had an interesting interview with Illinois House Republican Leader Tom Cross.
Cross told the Trib that the recent election to replace Dennis Hastert proves that Illinois Republicans need to stop fighting with each other. Hastert’s district was considered a strongly Republican district, but the GOP challenger there, Jim Oberweis, lost by a significant margin to Democrat Bill Foster.
Cross said the congressional results point to a larger problem for Republicans in general—a continued “fight because people aren’t on our same page on every issue”—that could leave the GOP “in the minority for a long time.”
“For us to lose, even in a special election, the seat held by the former speaker of the United States House of Representatives should be a big wake-up call for every Republican that the infighting—because someone’s not conservative enough or this enough or that enough—may have lasting consequences for us,” he said.
Cross’ words reminded me of something Jim Edgar, the popular Illinois governor who Republicans beg to run for a new office each election year, said when he visited one of my grad school classes last year.
Edgar predicted that the only way the Republican Party could win back the governor’s mansion will be with a moderate GOP candidate, because Illinois, once considered a belwether state, is becoming more and more Democratic.
Now Democrats do have a stranglehold on state government leadership, and by picking up Hastert’s seat, may be slowly pushing the Congressional delegation further into blue territory as well.
But I have to wonder: If Gov. Rod Blagojevich does eventually get indicted, as some people are predicting, isn’t it easier to believe it wouldn’t be quite so hard for Republicans to get a GOP governor?
After all, Blagojevich in 2003 was able to become the first Democratic governor since the ’70s, because former Gov. George Ryan was under investigation for federal corruption charges as well. He was able to win re-election in 2006 by very effectively beating this same dead horse.
I know it is not as simple as that, but it seems like the state Republicans could easily capitalize on the very public infighting among the state Democrats.
In a 2007 freelance article for an Illinois political magazine, our own Aaron Chambers took a close look at the state GOP.
The unraveling of the party’s stature laid bare the fragility of its statewide organization and the gulf between its leadership and its base. That weakness, ironically, may have resulted partly from the long string of top-of-the-ticket victories. The levers of party control were concentrated in the governor’s office through 26 years of Republican rule under Thompson, former Gov. Jim Edgar, and Ryan.
So when considering this issue, it seems we must also take remember this:
Statewide political organizations are not what they used to be. Increasingly, campaigns are driven by flashy candidates and television commercials, rather than party slating and palm cards. Last year, for instance, the Illinois Democratic Party couldn’t deliver a nomination for the one nonincumbent statewide candidate it backed in the primary election. Following the wishes of House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Chicago Democrat who is that party’s state chairman, Democrats slated Knox County State’s Attorney Paul Mangieri for treasurer, but primary voters nominated Chicago banker Alexi Giannoulias, who enjoyed a personal endorsement from ultrapopular U.S. Sen. Barack Obama.
Don’t forget to slather on a layer of “angry voter” backlash from an increasingly unpopular GOP administration in the White House, and maybe that simple equation actually looks more like a Harvard-level calculus problem.
Finding viable Republican candidates that can win contests against Illinois Democrats brings its own set of problems.
Part of this may come from the fractured views of what the state party should be. While Edgar, a moderate, would say a social moderate is the ideal Republican candidate to win in Illinois, others believe the party should return to its ideological roots.
One way to foresee the future of the state Republican Party may be through its “farm team” - or through the up-and-coming politicos throughout the state that the party is throwing its support behind financially and otherwise.
A good example of that was the southern Illinois race between incumbent Mayor Brad Cole and then-Councilwoman Sheila Simon, the daughter of the late Sen. Paul Simon. I covered that race for the student newspaper, and in a story just a few weeks before the April election, Cross’ spokesman David Dring, explained why the state Republicans donated so much money to a mayoral race in this 30,000-person college town.
“We’ve been trying to do a better job of grooming young talent such as Mayor Cole,” Dring said. “If he chooses, we believe he has a bright future.”
Back to the Trib piece, Cross, who is considered a moderate, also had one other interesting point:
Still, Cross acknowledged there is no one with the authority within the GOP to stop the infighting.
“I’d like to think in an ideal world, we’d have the big strong person who comes in, bangs everybody’s head together and says, ‘This is stupid. It doesn’t accomplish anything. It hurts us,’ ” he said. “I don’t know that that person exists right now.”
But then again, maybe Republicans will be able to use the November election to start swinging things back in their favor, or at least be able to minimize the damage, according to this Stateline article.
Nationally, it is possible that the Democrats could make significant gains once again, but history is against them. Some of the biggest landslides in voting for the legislatures have come during midterm elections — 1958, 1966, 1974, 1994 and 2006 among them — and not presidential years. This pattern isn’t set in stone, but early analysis by “Out There” sees only modest legislative gains this cycle — maybe even a wash — meaning that Democratic strength in the legislatures looks likely to last for at least another cycle.
This analysis calls Illinois a “Likely D” state, but not safely Democratic. With a 67-51 split in the House and a 37-22 mix in the Senate, is the Illinois Republican Party on its way to an early grave? Or can they claw their way back into relevance? If so, how? Or would you argue that politics is cyclical and voters will begin choosing Republicans soon enough? There is even more to this story, I’m sure, and I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
