Illinois Senate President John Cullerton says he had a simple message for House Republican Leader Tom Cross in the waning hours of the spring legislative session: "See you in July."

As you probably know by now, Cullerton's Senate voted to add $430 million to the House's austere state spending plan. The Senate initially wanted to spend a billion dollars more than the House, but many of Cullerton's Democratic members demanded that they at least get something, so they came up with a list totaling $430 million.

House Speaker Michael Madigan couldn't agree to the additional spending unless Leader Cross also signed off, because the two had decided months earlier to stand together on the budget. Cross said he wouldn't agree to the additional Senate spending, even though Cullerton said he'd found a way to pay for it.

Mike MadiganIn all the years I've covered Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, he has never allowed his chamber's Republican minority leader to best him. A minority leader might score a win here and there, but those victories are always short-lived. The wins are almost akin to a challenge to Madigan's manhood itself, and they are never allowed to stand.

And so it was yet again with workers' compensation reform. House Republican Leader Tom Cross locked his caucus into a position against the bill the Sunday before the spring session adjourned, and the bill appeared to die.

Shortly after Governor Pat Quinn introduced a budget this year that was way out of balance, called for even higher taxes, and increased state spending, the General Assembly decided to ignore him.

That was back in February. Things haven't changed much since then.

The governor's original budget proposal was just so out of sync with political and fiscal reality that pretty much everybody knew quickly that something different would have to be done. It wasn't long before House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton decided that the best way to pass a reasonable, realistic budget was to cut the governor out of the process and hand the budget-making responsibilities over to the legislative appropriations committees, with strict spending limits.

Statehouse paranoia and angst always peak every 10 years in Springfield.

Why? The new state legislative-district maps are drawn, and that highly political process always involves generous amounts of partisan mischief-making and revenge.

This year is no different. The Democrats control both legislative chambers and the governor's office, so they can pretty much draw any map they want as long as they follow federal and state voting-rights laws that protect minorities and other "communities of interest."

The Republicans, locked out of power and influence, just knew they were in for a beating, and they got one. In many respects, it probably wasn't as bad as it was 10 years ago, when the Democrats drew a map so solidly partisan that the House and Senate Democratic majorities easily survived one of the biggest Republican landslides in history.

With the economy the way it is, just about every state in the country is frantically scrambling to keep its local corporations from leaving or attracting new jobs by doling out huge government incentives.

Illinois, of course, is a special case, which means it'll probably cost us lots more to keep and attract jobs than just about any other state.

Our years-long political civil war between former Governor Rod Blagojevich and House Speaker Mike Madigan during the worst international economic crisis since the Great Depression saddled the state with migraines for years to come. No problems were solved or even addressed while everything was collapsing around them during their fight to the death. By the time Blagojevich was finally arrested, impeached, and removed from office, the state found itself with a $9-billion hole in its budget.

Rahm EmanuelRahm Emanuel will be sworn in as Chicago's new mayor on May 16, just 15 days before the end of the state legislative session. So while Emanuel has more than enough on his plate dealing with the first Chicago mayoral transition in 22 years, he and his team appear well aware that they will have precious few days to get what they want out of the Statehouse after he's inaugurated.

Emanuel's transition team hired a Statehouse emissary several weeks ago. They're not calling him a "lobbyist," however. He's more of an "observer," they say. And they decided not to call attention to themselves by choosing any of the well-known, Chicago-connected contract lobbyists in town. Instead, they hired Mike Ruemmler, who ran Emanuel's campaign advance team. Born and raised in southern Illinois' Mt. Vernon, Ruemmler is not your typical city lobbyist. Ruemmler ran a campaign for state Senator Michael Frerichs, so he has some Statehouse connections.

Emanuel has tried hard not to step on Mayor Daley's toes, using the "one mayor at a time" phrase over and over. While that philosophy has extended to Springfield, it doesn't mean Emanuel is completely uninvolved. He sat down with House Speaker Michael Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton, and Senator Kimberly Lightford before the final school-reform deal was made. His staff also worked on behalf of Lightford's bill, and Emanuel has since pledged to make sure the House passes it.

As if it isn't complicated enough to pass a workers-compensation reform bill - what with unions, trial lawyers, and the medical community so far allied together against major changes - there's also a noticeable schism within the business lobby about what to do and how far to go.

This schism isn't new. In one way or another, the major business groups compete against each other for members and, therefore, tend to tout themselves as the true leaders over the others. That sometimes-friendly, sometimes-not rivalry intensified a bit since the Democrats won complete power in 2002.

Some big Chicago-area retailers have found a way to avoid paying high local sales taxes on their wholesale purchases. They've essentially set up their own "tax havens" in Downstate counties that have no local sales taxes. The havens are mostly just one-person offices with a fax machine.

The retailers contract to purchase mass quantities of fuel, or construction equipment, or lumber, or whatever, and then those contracts are faxed to their little Downstate offices, stamped as received and then faxed back to headquarters and - voilà - no high local sales taxes are owed.

Back in January, the Illinois Department of Revenue lost a court case filed by Hartney Fuel Oil Company, Putnam County, and the little town of Mark, Illinois (population 500). Hartney is based in Cook County but had a "sales office" in no-tax Mark. The Department of Revenue claimed Hartney owed sales taxes in Cook, but a Putnam County judge disagreed.

Nobody really noticed. But then some folks got the bright idea of introducing a bill at the Statehouse to codify the Downstate court case to make certain that all Chicago-area companies had the same option.

Bad move.

Anheuser-Busch has reportedly hired more than a dozen Statehouse lobbyists this spring to protect its interests in a long-running battle to control how it distributes its brews in Illinois.

The St. Louis-based company has, in the past, owned a beer distributorship in Illinois. It sought to buy another one in Chicago but was blocked by the Illinois Liquor Control Commission. So the company sued in federal court.

In the process, Anheuser-Busch discovered that two relatively small Illinois "craft brewers" were allowed to distribute their own beer in Illinois, but out-of-state craft brewers weren't given the same privilege. The brewer's suit tried to use that contradiction to its advantage.

Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman seemed to be under the impression after his meeting last week with Governor Pat Quinn that the state's income-tax hike would actually expire in four years.

"The tax increase is temporary," Oberhelman told reporters, who wanted to know how he really felt about the recent tax hike. There'd been much media speculation that the Caterpillar CEO was so unhappy about the tax increase that he might move his company elsewhere. Oberhelman added that revenue growth will be necessary to fill the gap, and "it's going to take some spending cuts," which, he said, he was confident that Quinn could pull off.

After Oberhelman answered the question, Quinn told reporters that the "income tax is a four-year situation," and said he wanted to "erase the deficit" during that time.

Technically and legally, the tax hike is temporary. Two income-tax hikes have been allowed to expire in Illinois history, so it's possible that this one will as well.

But the governor used phantom revenues in his most recent budget plan and proposed an increase in state spending, not a decrease.

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