The Illinois Senate had been scheduled to return to Springfield on October 6 after not being in session since September 9. But last week, the Senate President postponed session until October 20.

The reason is pretty straightforward.

The Senate has overridden several gubernatorial vetoes. It's pretty easy for the majority party because the chamber has 39 Democrats, three more than the three-fifths required to override a veto.

The House has 71 Democrats, the exact number of votes required to overturn a veto in that chamber. So the Senate Democrats can be missing a few people or have some folks who don't want to go along and still override the governor on partisan votes. But the House Democrats need every member in town, and they all need to be voting the same way for that chamber to succeed.

Because of that tight margin, and because the Republicans have marched in lockstep with their party's governor, the House has only overridden one veto this entire year: the Heroin Crisis Act.

And the House was only able to override that bill because Governor Bruce Rauner allowed House Republicans to vote against his amendatory veto, which stripped out state Medicaid funding for heroin-addiction treatment. Rauner now gets to portray himself as fiscally conservative, while the Republicans got to do the right thing and make the much-needed criminal-justice-reform legislation an actual law.

To date, the governor and his staff have successfully fought off 62 override attempts, mainly in the House.

So much for Speaker Michael Madigan's much-vaunted veto-proof House majority.

Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger said last week that state government's backlog of unpaid bills will hit $8.5 billion by the end of December, up from about $6 billion right now.

That's a headline-grabbing number, since the end of December is not exactly the greatest time for people and companies that are owed money by the state. The state's bill backlog was about $8 billion this past January, right after most of the 2011 state-income-tax hike expired. But the backlog fell to $3.5 billion by the end of July, and just $2.3 billion of those bills were more than 30 days overdue.

But let's take a look at another estimate Comptroller Munger released last week. The comptroller totaled state spending from last fiscal year that isn't currently being mandated by federal and state court decrees (Medicaid bills, state employee and judicial salaries, etc.), continuing appropriations (bond and pension payments, legislative salaries), signed appropriations bills (K-12 education), and other things, and came up with $4.3 billion.

The $4.3 billion is the total amount that was paid out last year but is not currently being sent to colleges and universities, state-employee health-care providers, non-Medicaid social-service providers, MAP Grant college-student-aid recipients, and lottery winners over $25,000, plus various "transfers out," including to local governments for things such as motor-fuel-tax distributions.

Eventually, that money will have to be paid in full or in part, or significant portions of the state are gonna be in a big world of hurt.

The Illinois fiscal crisis is only going to get worse, and the solution is becoming more difficult by the day.

As you probably know, the General Assembly and the governor have not yet agreed on a full state budget. But because of various federal judicial orders, a signed education-funding bill, and several ongoing statutory "continuing appropriations" (debt service, pension payments, legislative salaries, etc.), the government is on pace to spend billions of dollars more than it will bring in this fiscal year.

Guesstimates have been tossed around by various folks that the state could run out of money by March or maybe April if no formal budget agreement is reached. That's because all the judicial orders etc. are based on last fiscal year's budget, but last year's budget was based on revenue from a 5-percent income tax - which automatically fell to 3.75 percent in January.

Long term is grim, but so is the short term.

The absurd facade of this long-running state-government impasse might best be summed up with two brief statements.

(1) Governor Bruce Rauner to Democrats: Just support my plans to eviscerate organized labor and I'll give you the rare privilege of voting to raise everybody's income taxes.

(2) Democrats to Rauner: Just accept our piddly little workers' compensation reforms and we'll let you put all Republican legislators on an income-tax-hike bill, which you can then, of course, gleefully sign into law.

Those two statements bring to mind a long-ago description of the play Waiting for Godot. It was, the reviewer wrote, a play in which "nothing happens, twice."

Ain't that the truth. Neither of these things will ever happen.

I have heard some portray this standoff as something like a religious war, in which each side is so wedded to their own core belief structures - particularly when it comes to labor unions (Rauner against, Democrats for) - that all rapprochement is impossible.

But as hard-line as the summer has most certainly appeared, I am increasingly convinced that this overtime session isn't quite as simple as either of those comparisons.