Governor Bruce Rauner didn't completely close the door to higher taxes last week during a speech at the University of Chicago, but he made it clear with what he said and what he did that he wants huge state budget cuts.

"We have every reason to thrive," Rauner said during the speech. He then laid out his reasoning for why the state is on a "fundamentally unsustainable path," pointing his finger at the "policies and the politics mostly coming out of Springfield really at the core of the problem. ...

"The politicians want to talk about 'Well, let's raise the income tax to fix the debt or the problem," Rauner said. "Raising taxes will come nowhere near to fixing the problem and in fact will make part of the problem worse and just kick the can down the road. ... This is the critical lesson that we're seeing. We're on an unsustainable path, we need fundamental structural change, and raising taxes alone in itself isn't going to fix the problem and in a lot of ways it's going to make it worse."

We likely received an early lesson last week in how the upcoming state-legislative session will play out with new Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and a Democratic General Assembly.

The Democrats jammed through their plan to limit the term of incoming Republican Comptroller Leslie Munger to two years, with a special election in the presidential year of 2016. Rauner appointed Munger to replace Judy Baar Topinka, who passed away last month.

Rauner remained silent in the days leading up to the special legislative session, but the House and Senate Republicans went ballistic.

As you likely already know, Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka passed away last week.

Topinka had a stroke the morning of December 9, but that's not what killed her. In fact, by the afternoon, she announced she was going to walk to the restroom. Her chief of staff, Nancy Kimme, told her not to try because she was paralyzed on her left side. In mocking defiance, Topinka started kicking her no-longer-paralyzed leg.

By early evening, medical staff told Topinka that she'd be out of the hospital in a few days and would then need three weeks of rehabilitation. The indestructible Topinka appeared to have won again, just like she did after she fell and broke her hip and badly injured her back after giving a speech in 2012. The accident slowed her down, but it never stopped her, never silenced her, never broke her spirit, never stopped her from running for re-election.

Whenever a new governor is about to be sworn in, one of the most popular Springfield parlor games is figuring out who is on their way out and who is on their way in.

Of course, when a new governor is sworn in from a different party, the "who is out" part is relatively easy - pretty much everybody without civil-service job protection is out. Governor-elect Bruce Rauner is a Republican who just defeated Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, so almost all of Quinn's people are surely gone.

But who will Rauner bring in to run the government? I cannot tell you how many times I'm asked that question every day.

Much of the recent local speculation has focused on Republican state legislators, partly because most of the people closest to the outsider Rauner are unknown to the Springfield crowd. Legislators, on the other hand, are very well known. Some of those legislators are not-so-subtly floating their own names; some are just naturally assumed to be on a short list.

As a result, there are so many rumors going around about so many legislators being "sure thing" appointments that I long ago lost track of the count. It seems at times that the number could be half of the Republican caucus.