I’d been hearing since the end of May, when the General Assembly adjourned for the summer, that there were some problems with the state budget legislation which needed to be fixed. Some effective dates apparently weren’t drafted right. But, silly me, I failed to follow my own rules and didn’t read the bill (SB2800) for myself. The scope of the problem was worse than I thought, but the most pressing issue was the House did not have nearly enough votes to correct its massive mistakes when the chamber returned to Springfield on June 16. It became a major test of rookie House Speaker Chris Welch’s influence.

I interviewed both House Speaker Chris Welch and Governor JB Pritzker last week, so I thought I’d tell you about one of the overlaps. Speaker Welch followed a man who had been in office for decades, so comparisons are unavoidable. When former House Speaker Michael Madigan was around, we were always playing endless guessing games. What is he really up to? What does he really want? What’s he really trying to say?

If I had told you during the brief legislative session last May, while the state was still under a stay-at-home order and everything appeared to be collapsing, that Illinois would have an extra $2 billion laying around to pay off the remainder of a $3.2-billion federal loan, you might have thought I was insane. But here we are.