I spent the better part of last Wednesday asking folks around the Statehouse if they had anything positive to tell me. I went looking for anything that might indicate a silver lining to this increasingly nasty spring legislative session.
Mostly, people just laughed at me.
Other than some individual personal developments, there just wasn't much positivity around. The governor's chief of staff, Mike Zolnierowicz, and his incomparable wife Barret were about to have a new baby. They're great people and that's wonderful news, but it also means that "Z" was not going to be able to work on solving the problems for a few days.
A gaming-expansion bill appeared to be progressing. But I'm told the governor is in no mood to sign it as long as his "Turnaround Agenda" is being ignored by the majority Democrats.
The Senate Democrats, meanwhile, were expected to move legislation to help Chicago out of its horrific fiscal mess, but there's still the problem with the governor's refusal to do anything for the Democrats until he gets what he wants.
So I came up with nothing.
The governor's list of demands had been whittled down, but he still wasn't backing off his insistence that the General Assembly give him at least some anti-union "right to work" local zones. He wanted a "causation" standard for workers' compensation and a property-tax freeze, which in even watered-down forms continued to be a nonstarter.
The list of demands went on and on, but in exchange, the governor was willing to support $3.5 billion in new revenues, which doesn't sound too bad until you realize that he also wanted the Democrats to agree to $3 billion in spending cuts. The governor's folks thought they were being generous by offering more revenues than cuts, but the Democrats pointed out that getting their people to vote for both tax hikes and spending cuts was pretty much impossible.
Instead, the Dems talked last week about sending the governor an unbalanced budget, telling him to cut as much as he could and then they'd come back and help provide the revenue to make the monster balance. They wanted to put the cuts on Rauner's head, and his head only.
But it was more likely that Rauner would simply veto the budget bill in its entirety and harangue the Democrats via a massive TV ad campaign for once again producing an "irresponsibly unbalanced budget." And I'm hearing that when the clock strikes June 1, the governor's list of 80 demands and concessions goes out the window, and he will put his entire agenda back on the table and withdraw all the concessions, including (and especially) much-needed new revenues.
So, in an admittedly desperate attempt to find something positive to write about, I maneuvered two people, one from each side, to a table last Wednesday night to see if they could hash out one little thing.
Take it from me: These guys are all talking past each other. They just don't understand each other, although it did appear that the governor's people were slightly more willing to cut a deal, and they appeared to "get" the Democrats at least a bit more than the Dems appeared to "get" the governor.
The Rauner folks know, at least somewhere deep down, that attacking unions is an existential issue for the Democratic Party. The Dems ain't gonna move a millimeter on that one. But the Rauner folks have been pointing out that raising taxes is also a potentially existential issue for Rauner and the GOP. He can't just break his promise to reform government and the economy and then hand the majority party a gigantic tax hike. He'll get slaughtered for that. Maybe the Dems know that and want to force him to cut his own political throat or, being Democrats, they just don't comprehend how tax-averse he is. But as long as he's willing to go part-way on revenues, they're going to try to push him to go the full boat.
And then I got home Wednesday night and read Rauner's op-ed in the State Journal-Register: "If legislators are willing to reform how we do business, they will find me an eager partner," the governor wrote. "If they are not, then they should expect a very long extra session, because I will keep fighting for major reforms."
Like I said: I got pretty much nothing in the way of good news.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and CapitolFax.com.
