Illinois, land of dysfunction

October 15th, 2008 at 10:58am Wally Haas

I’ve attended a handful of candidate forums and we’ve had candidates come here to the News Tower and when it comes to candidates for the General Assembly they all promise to work together, across party lines.

What party lines? Democrats have a supermajority in the Senate, making Republicans almost irrelevant and they are within four seats of having a supermajority in the House. Republicans HAVE to work across party lines to get things for their districts because their is no other choice. Democrats would be better served if they worked to heal the divisions within their own party; they can get things done without Republican help.

Also, I have yet to hear anyone defend the governor. Monday you read in Chuck Sweeny’s column that Democratic candidate Greg Tuite agrees with Republican incumbent Ron Wait that the governor should be impeached. Many candidates, from both parties, consider the governor to be the reason for political gridlock.  Some blame Speaker of the House Mike Madigan because of his refusal to sit down face-to-face with the governor, but cut Madigan  some slack because they say the governor cannot be trusted.

Illinois has four major political parties: The Green Party, which is running candidates for state rep, U.S. senator and U.S. rep among others, the Republicans, the Blagojevich/Jones Democrats and the Madigan Democrats. It’s the latter two’s failure to work together that has put important issues such as school financing, capital construction and pension debt on hold.

How do we fix this? It’s tempting to say we should vote out all incumbents and start over, but that would eliminate some good people who have not contributed to the current mess. However, some fresh voices, if they don’t allow themselves to be swallowed by the present political culture, could make a difference.

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