Finally, a little bit of good news for Illinois Democrats.

In stark contrast to the glacially paced House Committee on Investigations, the panel charged with deciding indicted state Representative Derrick Smith's punishment looks like it will move forward much more quickly.

The investigations committee took two months to decide that there was enough evidence against Smith (D-Chicago) to warrant punishment. Smith was arrested and then indicted just before the March primary on charges that he accepted $7,000 in cash bribes. It was June before that committee took final action.

The two House leaders then appointed members to the Select Committee on Discipline, and that committee's first meeting was last week.

Only a handful of state House Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat by the Republicans were endorsed by the Illinois AFL-CIO last week, but the damage to the Democratic Party's chances this fall will likely be minimal.

As state legislative support for a cigarette-tax hike grew in late May, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and other conservatives stepped into the Illinois fray.

A top House Republican said more than a week ago that the roll call in favor of a dollar-a-pack cigarette-tax hike was in the double digits within his caucus. The tax would raise $700 million, including the federal match, to help close the Medicaid program's gaping $2.7-billion budget hole.

In return, Republicans won concessions from the Democrats, particularly when it came to sparing doctors from Governor Pat Quinn's proposed Medicaid-provider rate cuts.

Senate President John Cullerton has been telling some of his members for weeks that he was resigned to an overtime session. The General Assembly likely wouldn't be able to adjourn by the scheduled May 31 deadline, he said. There was just no getting around it, so people should just accept that fact and move forward.

But not long ago, Cullerton reportedly came to the conclusion that if the spring session did go into overtime, Republicans would likely keep everyone bottled up in Springfield all summer long. So now his focus is on getting everybody out of town by the end of May.

May 31 is an important deadline because all bills voted on after that date require a three-fifths majority to pass. That means no budget can be approved, no Medicaid solution can be found, no pension systems can be reformed without supermajorities.

The Democrats control both legislative chambers, but they don't have three-fifths. They're seven votes shy in the House and one vote short in the Senate. One vote may not seem like a lot, but the partisanship can sometimes get so intense in the General Assembly these days that one vote might as well be a hundred.