A massive turnaround in the Illinois House may have whetted political appetites for even more corporate tax relief. But don't count on it just yet.

As you may recall, a tax-cut plan for corporations and individuals failed miserably in the House a few weeks ago, getting eight votes - comically short of the 60 needed for passage.

So the House went home for two weeks and some intense lobbying began. When state representatives came back to Springfield, a slightly revised version of the corporate-tax-cut plan passed with a whopping 81 votes. The bill will grant large tax breaks to CME Group and Sears to keep them from leaving the state, as well as a few broad-based provisions.

It's a fairly common Statehouse phenomenon that bills will zoom out of the Senate or the House and then flame out in the other chamber. People in the other chamber don't always care as much as the people who first sponsor the bills. Often, they also don't want to be pushed around by the other chamber.

That explains part of what happened last week, when the Senate passed a major tax-cut package with a super-majority of 36 votes and then the bill received only eight votes in the House, despite the fact that the Senate bill would cost just a few million dollars more than the House's plan.

There's far more to this failure than the usual House-versus-Senate dynamic, of course. House Speaker Michael Madigan has declared neutrality on the bill, apparently because of a conflict of interest. Without the "Velvet Hammer" pushing hard for what is obviously a hugely controversial measure, the House just couldn't get it done.

While all eyes last week turned to the Republicans' lawsuit against the new federal district map for U.S. congressmen in Illinois, a similar GOP lawsuit against the legislative district map for Springfield's state senators and representatives may be teetering on the brink of collapse.

Many of the same arguments are being used by the Republicans in both the congressional and state-legislative cases. Both suits have a partisan angle. The Republicans claim that the majority Democrats so intensely used political gerrymandering to draw their maps that the end result illegally deprived Republicans of their constitutional rights.

The court that is hearing the congressional-map case has yet to rule on the political angle, but the court that heard the state-legislative-remap case dismissed the Republicans' political charge last week. The political gerrymandering strategy was never considered all that solid because nobody has ever won a case using that argument. The strategy is given about the same chance of success - slim to none - in the congressional case.

In an exclusive interview last week, CME Group Executive Chair Terry Duffy said he's more than ready to leave Illinois if he doesn't get what he believes is a "fair" tax deal from the General Assembly.

The company owns the Chicago Board of Trade and several other firms. It's a very big wheel in this state, and leaving would be the worst sort of news for Democrats who raised taxes this year.

Duffy has been under intense pressure all year from Wall Street to reduce expenses. State taxes are listed as expenses on corporate books, so Duffy has been publicly fuming about his company's $150-million-a-year state-tax burden since corporate tax rates were increased.

Duffy claims CME pays 6 percent of all corporate income taxes in Illinois, and pays more than any other company. "I don't know another company in the world that pays 6 percent of another state's taxes."