Illinois House Deputy Majority Leader Jehan Gordon-Booth (D-Peoria) headed up her chamber’s efforts to amend the controversial SAFE-T Act this year. The day before the bill came up for a vote, I asked her what were, in her opinion, the largest misconceptions about the 2021 social justice reform law. Gordon-Booth pointed to the trespassing issue. “I don't care if you live in rural, urban, suburban. The trespassing [issue] was one that just made a lot of folks incredibly uncomfortable.”

Our 1,004th print edition of the River Cities' Reader will be our proverbial last printed words for 2022. Some of the most important words will come from Whitney Webb and Iain Davis expressed in the first of a series of articles: “Sustainable Debt Slavery.”

The state legislative debate last week over amending the Pre-Trial Fairness Act provisions within the controversial SAFE-T Act featured many of the same obfuscations and outright misinformation that characterized the fall campaign by Republicans and many of the same insufficient answers by Democrats. One of the problems that the super-majority Democrats have in both chambers is that when they know their bill is going to pass, they usually don’t take the Republicans’ objections seriously enough to fully engage with them. But on bills like this, misinformation can spread when points aren’t adequately rebutted.

Governor JB Pritzker’s administration recently used its annual Economic and Fiscal Policy Report to outline three new budget proposals. The report revised projected revenues upward by $3.69 billion for this fiscal year, but noted that most of the projected increase was from one-time sources, like an unexpected spike in the state’s Income Tax Refund Fund of $1.28 billion.