As it turns out, Illinois House Democrats didn't need Republicans to put 30 votes on a significant pension-reform bill.

There's been worry for at least two years that the Democrats would have to rely heavily on Republicans to get anything out of the chamber and that maybe even 30 Republican votes - half the required 60-vote majority - wouldn't be enough to pass a pension-reform bill.

But 41 House Democrats voted for a bill this month that severely whacked retirees' annual cost-of-living increases. Just 25 Republicans voted for the bill - five votes fewer than they've repeatedly said they had for a significant pension-reform proposal.

The measure would cap annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) at $750 or 3 percent, whichever is less. That change has the impact of limiting COLAs to only the first $25,000 of annual pension income. Anyone who makes less than $25,000 would continue to receive compounded increases until the cap is hit.

The proposal also forces retirees to wait until they either are 67 years old or have been retired at least five years to receive their annual COLAs.

"Pardon me," said Ty Fahner to a nearby microphone that he had accidentally bumped during testimony to the Illinois Senate Executive Committee last week.

Fahner could probably be excused for apologizing to an inanimate object. The president of the Chicago-based, business-backed Civic Committee and self-styled pension expert had been forced to sit in the hearing room and wait for hours before testifying against Senate President John Cullerton's omnibus pension-reform bill.

Cullerton was obviously furious with Fahner for helping organize the opposition to his bill, and he grilled former Illinois Attorney General Fahner mercilessly, tag-teaming with Senate President Pro Tempore Don Harmon, who picked apart the hostile witness piece by piece. Fahner tried to remain calm, but apologizing to the mic showed how much he was rattled.

Nobody ever really knows what's going through the head of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan except for Madigan himself. So the actual purpose behind last week's highly choreographed gun-control and pension-reform debates - ordered up by Madigan - wasn't completely clear to anyone.

That's by design, of course. Madigan prefers to keep people in the dark until he's ready to make his final move.

But I did hear one theory from a Democrat that made quite a bit of sense - at least for a while.

"Off topic? I can't imagine what that would be," cracked Governor Pat Quinn last week during a press conference. Just hours before, his lieutenant governor had announced that she would not be his 2014 running mate.

Quinn usually does a pretty good job during his press conferences of convincing reporters to wait to ask off-topic questions until all questions about the subject at hand have been asked. Last week was no exception.

Quinn was holding a presser with U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to discuss her conditional approval allowing Illinois to move forward with an online health-insurance exchange - a major step toward implementing the president's national health-care plan.

"You could get caught by stray bullets," Quinn jokingly warned the folks who had gathered with him to make the announcement. "You don't have to be part of the firing squad," he added with a laugh.

He knew what was coming. Earlier in the morning, the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute had released a poll showing that Quinn was badly trailing Lisa Madigan in a hypothetical primary matchup. By mid-morning, the late Senator Simon's daughter, Sheila, had announced that she wouldn't be running with Quinn again. Simon's aides said she didn't know about the poll from her father's think tank, but the irony wasn't lost on those of us who watch these things.