items tagged with John Cullerton

I told my newsletter subscribers several weeks ago that, without a doubt, if Senate President John Cullerton caved in to House Speaker Michael Madigan on pension reform, Cullerton’s legacy as Madigan’s junior partner would be forever sealed.

The two men have battled for months over the proper way to proceed. Cullerton has said that the state Constitution requires that public workers and retirees be given a set of options before their pension benefits can be reduced. Madigan has said that idea doesn’t save enough money, and he has looked for the most cost savings possible. With the pension system at $100 billion in unfunded liability and taxpayer costs rising by about a billion dollars a year, this has become the most important state fiscal issue of our time. It has to be resolved.

I ran into Madigan not long after I wrote that stuff about Cullerton’s possible cave. “Rich, you’re not helping,” he said to me.

Illinois Senate President John Cullerton has received a lot of bad press, sharp condemnation from Republicans, and even some quiet criticism from his own members over the past month.

But Cullerton made no apologies during an interview last week for the way his caucus sought to hold the state’s public-works bill hostage by tacking on $430 million in additional budget items. The move was rejected by both parties in the House, by Senate Republicans, and even, in the end, by Governor Pat Quinn, who had pushed for additional spending all year. The General Assembly had to return to town last week so the Senate could officially back down from the spending and send a “clean” bill to the governor’s desk.

The Senate President told me numerous times over the past several months that he believed he could convince House Speaker Michael Madigan – a fellow Democrat – to go along with his budget plans. In the end, however, Madigan stuck to a budget pact he’d made months earlier with House Republican Leader Tom Cross and beat back the Senate Democrats’ plan. So what went wrong?