Near the top of any list of Illinois government’s many problems is that House Speaker Michael Madigan has made a decades-long game out of messing with the minds and agendas of our governors.
Since 1983, Madigan’s jiu-jitsu moves against whoever happens to be governor have been a constant. Sometimes he was wholly justified (particularly in the waning months of Rod Blagojevich’s administration), but he often appears to do this simply because he can. Just ask Pat Quinn; that guy never did figure out why Madigan constantly messed with him.
Understandably, that can get on one’s nerves. Governors can start seeing nefarious plots where none actually exist – as when Governor Bruce Rauner recently shut down a leaders’ meeting after Senate President John Cullerton spit-balled an idea about a stopgap budget to get the state past the election. Rauner thought at the time that it was somehow a plot by Madigan to scuttle the non-budget negotiations – even though Madigan said during the meeting that he didn’t support his fellow Democrat’s idea.
I do give Rauner some credit, however. The guy has some jiu-jitsu moves of his own. The governor eventually flip-flopped and decided to demand passage of a stopgap appropriations bill at the spring session’s 11th hour, completely reversing course from just a few days earlier when he rejected the same idea from Cullerton.
Madigan had told Rauner and the other leaders that he’d only support a stopgap proposal for the current fiscal year, not the one that starts on July 1. So Rauner can now once again blame Madigan, with justification this time, if a stopgap isn’t approved and the government completely falls apart.
But the governor’s default position of blaming Madigan and the Democrats for almost everything got him in a bit of trouble last week.
During a mostly Downstate PR tour, according to the Quad-City Times, Rauner accused Democrats of shying away from “tough votes” on things such as Exelon’s corporate bailout. Exelon had just announced that it was closing two Downstate nuclear power plants because it couldn’t get its bailout legislation passed.
But passing Exelon’s bill wouldn’t have been a “tough” vote; it would’ve been a stupid vote.
The bill simply isn’t soup yet. Yes, negotiators got closer than they ever had in the spring session’s final days, but the interests that weren’t at the negotiating table have yet to have their say.
The only way a massive corporate subsidy for an otherwise fabulously profitable company can be passed is if all four legislative leaders and the governor are pulling in the same direction. And that can’t happen until all stakeholders have their say.
Without that progress, voting to hike electricity rates on just about everybody to save some jobs is both legislative and political stupidity. And to grant the company more than $2 billion in subsidies that cannot be clawed back if the plants become profitable is, frankly, ridiculous.
Not to mention that one of those districts with a nuke plant targeted for closure is represented by Republican Representative Bill Mitchell. I happen to admire the guy for his survival skills, but he has made a career out of railing against welfare and demanding that Chicago secede from the state. To bail out his district while the governor publicly fumes on an almost daily basis about not wanting to help Chicago’s fiscally bereft public-school system is disingenuous in the extreme.
And despite saying that he has “focused” on this problem for “quite a while” and was “in there fighting hard,” Rauner never once mentioned Exelon’s legislation at the leaders’ meetings. His staff also reportedly waved off an inquiry by House Democratic staff about where the governor stood. As the Quad-City Times noted in an editorial, Rauner never made any sort of firm public commitment to the proposal except to have his staff say the matter was “under review.”
This Exelon finger-pointing put the governor’s gamesmanship on display. He’s never to blame; he’s just a helpless victim of the Democrats.
If the governor has any mandate at all from the voters it’s to “Shake Up Springfield,” as he endlessly promised during the campaign. It was, by far, the defining “issue” for candidate Rauner. And nobody personifies “Springfield” in voters’ minds more than Madigan. To constantly portray himself as powerless to stop Madigan’s sorcery is essentially an admission of failure.
One day, people are gonna catch on to this.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and CapitolFax.com.
