When the Republican Party launches its quadrennial celebration in Cleveland this week to anoint its nominee for president, some prominent party faithful from Illinois won’t be there.
First-term U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk is out-front with his reason — he doesn’t like the presumptive nominee, businessman Donald Trump, calling him “too bigoted and racist” for the job.
But other top leaders, including Gov. Bruce Rauner, are joining Republicans from around the country in ditching the convention without saying why. Many face tough re-election races in November and are trying to distance themselves from the contentious name at the top of the ticket.
“I will be traveling the state of Illinois, meeting with community leaders, business leaders and some legislators and signing some of the most important legislation that got passed this spring,” Rauner said last week after declining to answer reporters’ questions about the convention or the presidential race, in general.
Gov. Bruce Rauner has signed legislation banning the sale of synthetic drugs known as “bath salts” in Illinois. […]
The Republican governor signed the bill on the same day the Republican National Convention began in Cleveland. Rauner said last week he is not attending the convention because he is traveling the state signing bills that lawmakers passed this year.
Gov. Bruce Rauner won’t attend the Republican National Convention or formally endorse Donald Trump for president as fallout from the controversial presumptive nominee reverberates throughout the Illinois GOP.
Aides to the first-term Republican governor said Rauner, who declined to back a candidate in what was once a crowded GOP presidential field, would remain focused on Illinois’ troubled finances. […]
Rauner repeatedly had sought to stay out of the presidential race, though he did say that as leader of the GOP in Illinois, he would back the eventual nominee. But Rauner aides stressed there are various levels of “support,” and that the governor would not be giving Trump a formal endorsement.
That story was published after a March statement by the governor that he would “do everything he can” to support the Republican Party’s nominee. Asked why, the governor said it’s because “I’m the leader of the Republican Party in Illinois.”
As a liberal group called Illinois Working Together correctly noted in a press release today, Rauner has “never clarified his ‘levels of support’ idea or indicated at which level he supported Trump.”
* IWT also pointed out that a couple weeks or so after saying he wouldn’t go to the national convention, and when it was abundantly clear that Donald Trump would be his party’s nominee, Gov. Rauner had this to say to the Illinois Republican Party convention…
“Republicans are gonna control our federal government in every office, in every office… Now is the time to come together, now is the time to unite, up and down the ticket… What we can’t do is have Hillary get in the White House. No way Hillary’s getting into the White House. No way, no way… This is the year we take back the White House.” [Emphasis added.]
The head of Illinois’ Republican Party sought to downplay any division that might exist among the rank and file over the nomination of Donald Trump.
Chairman Tim Schneider riled up the crowd of Illinois delegates at a delegation breakfast Monday morning in Cleveland, vowing that Illinois would work to elect Donald Trump in November, and that, counter to reports of division among the ranks, the state is “in lockstep” with Trump.
Schneider may be the “head,” but Rauner has claimed to be the “leader.”
Pence’s vice presidential race is headed by the same operative, Nick Ayers, who ran Rauner’s 2014 race for governor. Ayers described himself to me in a telephone call last year as a key player in Rauner’s campaign—the guy who drafted the campaign plan, hired staff, and handled media buying. He said, “I was the one who on election night [November 4, 2014] called [Rauner] and Diana in their hotel suite and told them we had won. I gave them the news before the AP called it.”
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Trump campaign is allowing Pence to select his own people and that Nick Ayers is heading Pence’s “own team of professional operatives.”
* The governor is clearly sending mixed messages, refusing all recent attempts by reporters to try and get him to clarify where he stands on Trump, while skipping a national convention where his party chairman declares the ILGOP is “in lockstep” with the candidate.
So, please. Pretty please. Answer the questions, governor.
* The Chicago Tribune asks if it’s fair or not to attempt to tie Illinois Republican candidates like Mark Kirk and Bob Dold to Donald Trump…
But really, who cares? Does it matter how often or how loudly candidates repudiate Trump?
Guilt-by-association tactics are a tried-and-true campaign strategy. Smearing a candidate through alleged connections is a cheap pivot away from the nation’s pressing problems — stagnant wages, out-of-control debt, civil unrest, terrorist threats here and abroad, the potential of a nuclear Iran, to name a few. Where a candidate stands on those issues ought to be far more important to voters than whether the candidate openly denounces Trump. […]
Are Kirk’s views on Trump or Pence a top priority for voters? No. Kirk vs. Duckworth is one of the most heated races in the country. It could determine whether Republicans keep their grip on the U.S. Senate or lose it to Democrats. Voters should be learning the candidates’ positions — on trade, immigration, spending, entitlement reform.
We can spend these final months grilling candidates about their ties, real or imaginary, to Trump. Or we can spend the rest of the campaign season focusing on issues that separate and distinguish those running for office.
* The Question: Is it fair or unfair to try and tie Republican candidates to Donald Trump? Take the poll and then explain your answer in comments, please.
* I thought maybe some of y’all would like to see the tweets and coverage of Illinois political reporters who are in Cleveland this week. I’ll be adding to the list as we go along. Follow the bouncing balls with ScribbleLive…
I’ve certainly heard Rauner raging about and impugning Madigan’s integrity and ethics with all the subtlety of an anonymous blog commenter. But I’ve never heard him suggest that perhaps Madigan is simply wrong on the issues, not evil.
“This is the first time he’s ever acknowledged that Madigan is coming from an ‘honest’ position,” wrote Capitol Fax publisher Rich Miller, who highlighted the TV interview on his website.
Maybe Rauner was tired. Maybe his mind wandered for a moment. Or maybe, and pardon my Pollyanna, he’s getting around to realizing that those who’ve been balking at his “reform” demands sincerely believe that his ideas will hurt middle-income earners and make life harder for working families. […]
His fans seem to approve. Every time I write something that casts doubt on elements of Rauner’s “turnaround agenda,” I am reliably inundated with messages demanding to know how much Madigan paid me to write it because, clearly, no independent thinker could possibly doubt the governor.
Ain’t that the truth.
* People love them some cartoons, and there is no greater cartoon battle in this state than Super Man Rauner vs. Darth Vader Madigan. Any criticism of the governor is automatically viewed as 100 percent support for Madigan. Some Facebook creepster actually asked me the other day if I was a drug user who’s being blackmailed by Madigan. I suggested he immediately seek psychiatric help. Let’s hope he does.
As for Trump’s impact on state legislative races, lawmakers and observers say it could vary widely by region.
While his presence on the ballot might help Republicans in Southern Illinois, it could hurt them in the Chicago suburbs, said Chris Mooney, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois.
The key will likely be which candidate and party inspires more voters to come to the polls – or to stay home, Mooney said.
“It’s not about changing people’s minds,” he said. “It’s about motivating your people to come out to vote and demobilizing the opponent’s voters.”
Yep. And Democrats will attempt to “nationalize” this race by putting Trump up front in certain areas. Republicans will want to make it more state-focused (meaning: Madigan).
Today, the House Republican Organization released two TV ads in Southern Illinois to further highlight Gary Forby and John Bradley’s history of backing Mike Madigan’s Chicago agenda.
Gary Forby has been Mike Madigan’s lieutenant in the Senate for over a decade. He voted for Madigan’s phony budgets 14 times and rubber stamped $13 billion in deficit spending. Instead of working to cut waste, Forby voted to double the income tax and expand the sales tax.
John Bradley claims to fight for Southern Illinois, but does Madigan’s bidding in Springfield, voting for billions in debt and tax breaks for a company that closed shop in Southern Illinois and shipped jobs to Chicago.
Gary Forby and John Bradley serve Mike Madigan, and Southern Illinois pays the price.
Script (Madigan’s Senator):
For decades, Mike Madigan’s had an iron grip on Springfield.
And…our own state Senator, Gary Forby.
Forby’s helped Madigan drive Illinois into the ditch.
Raising our taxes while shortchanging our schools.
14 times Forby backed Madigan’s phony budgets.
Thirteen billion in deficit spending.
He voted to double income tax and expand the sales taxes.
And Forby rubber- stamped Madigan’s bailout for Chicago Public Schools.
Gary Forby: Mike Madigan’s senator — not ours.
Script (The Madigan Thing):
ANNC: John Bradley says one thing here…
BRADLEY AD: “I’m John Bradley, I’ll never stop fighting for Southern Illinois.”
ANNC: But does another thing there — the Madigan thing.
And when Bradley does the Madigan thing, we pay the price.
Massive debt, higher taxes, a bailout for Chicago Schools.
Bradley even supported tax breaks for a company that closed shop here and shipped our jobs to Chicago.
John Bradley doing the Madigan thing — the wrong thing for Southern Illinois.
Although Rauner has said he doesn’t think any school district should get less money under a revised formula, Barickman said he doesn’t necessarily agree.
“It is politically expedient to take an approach where you say there are no losers. I think it’s easier to get votes on something when there’s no losers,” Barickman said. “But I also recognize in these times where no losers means more money, we have to be creative. I have long suggested my belief that some districts may be willing to take less if they are given more flexibility with the dollars they have and are given relief from some of the mandates the state imposes on them.”
There it is.
In order to get a deal, Democrats are going to have to face the music on highly popular unfunded mandates and local control (particularly over collective bargaining). It’s not going to be easy… to say the least.
2012 – 20% increase in school day/year without commensurate compensation.
2013 – 52 schools closed, hundreds laid off.
2015 – 100s of special educators laid off. No raises, no steps/lanes.
I’d say we’ve given a lot, not to mention a brutalizing evaluation culture based on voodoo VAM, incessant paperwork and a system so corrupt and vicious, principals and teachers at “good” schools are fleeing the system in droves let alone the so-called crumbling prisons. STOP THE FALSE EQUIVALENCY. CTU MEMBERS HAVE ALREADY GIVEN AND WE GOT OUR TAX BILLS TOO.
Unendorsing Trump was perhaps a more politically viable option for Kirk than for his fellow endangered Republican senators. “I’m probably the only one around here who absolutely embraces the M-word,” [Sen. Mark Kirk] said, referring to “moderate.”
And as the Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Rich Miller recently wrote, in Illinois “independent suburban women have been the deciding factor in just about every statewide race since 1990.” Given Trump’s 70 percent disapproval rating among women over all, criticizing the nominee may prove not only useful to Kirk, but also — especially against a female opponent like Duckworth — imperative.
That’s true, but suburban women can be more complicated than just that.
U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk may frequently be cited as among the most vulnerable incumbents in the country, but the national organization backing GOP Senate candidates says it’s planning to pour money into his race against Democrat Tammy Duckworth. […]
[NRSC Executive Director Ward Baker] declined to reveal how much the group was willing to invest, saying he wouldn’t disclose strategy. In Kirk’s 2010 race, the NRSC pledged $3.4 million.
“2010 was a different environment. Yesterday was a different day. I try to win a day at a time,” Baker told POLITICO Illinois. “Kirk has always run a suburban strategy. Senator Kirk has never had an easy race. The suburban strategy is how you’ll win. He’s the only candidate we knew who could win this race.” […]
Recent terror attacks in Europe and questions about national security strengthen Kirk’s hand in the race, Baker argued. Kirk, a former Naval intelligence officer, has called for a national moratorium on allowing Syrian refugees into the country, opposed President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, and opposed the closing of Guantanamo Bay.
“It helps him a lot. Do you want someone who has always been a hawk and at the forefront of protecting America? Or someone who supported closing Gitmo [allowing] Syrian refugees into Illinois and backed the Iran deal?” he said. “She’s a dove, he’s a hawk.”
I’ll believe the money when I see it. So far, the NRSC has treated Kirk like a red-headed stepchild.
In 2004, George W. Bush won reelection by mitigating the loss of the women’s vote to Democrat John Kerry to less than 10 percentage points. He did this, in part, by scaring “security moms” not to change horses mid-war.
If the absolute craziness in the world and in the nation the past few weeks continues through November and people truly start to freak out, then Sen. Kirk could capitalize on the fears of “security moms.” It’s probably his best hope.
Former Gov. Jim Edgar publicly endorsed Bruce Rauner for governor in 2014 and traveled the state to help Rauner win.
But less than six months after Rauner was inaugurated, Edgar began to criticize his fellow Republican. It was gentle at first, saying in early June of last year that Rauner should maybe stop calling the Democratic legislative leaders “corrupt” if he wanted to get a budget deal, and suggesting that he set aside his anti-union/pro-business “Turnaround Agenda” to make that deal.
By August, Edgar again urged Rauner to cut a deal on the budget, saying there were just some things in his proposals that no Democrat would ever agree to.
In October, Edgar warned that “government is failing,” and he sharply criticized Rauner for holding people and programs “hostage” to his legislative demands.
Rauner and his top staff were seething by then, but the governor mostly held his tongue. “I don’t spend any time criticizing my fellow Republicans,” the governor said at the time.
But Rauner did add a veiled warning shot, saying, “I do not spend any time criticizing decisions made in the past that created the mess that we’re dealing with.”
Rauner was referring to the now notorious Edgar “pension ramp” law passed in 1994 that finally forced Illinois to make its pension payments but put off any steep contribution increases until after Edgar was safely out of office. Some have claimed that Edgar’s ramp got us into this fiscal mess today.
My opinion is that Edgar finally got something done, however flawed, that nobody else had managed to do. The problem was exacerbated by subsequent moves to skip and skimp on those payments.
Edgar didn’t get the hint and didn’t mute his criticism in the intervening months. Rauner finally fired back July 5.
Right off the bat, I should say that I think the so-called “stopgap budget” signed into law on June 30 was a good idea. Not fiscally, but because people who rely on state government desperately needed a break from the all-out legislative war between two ideologically entrenched parties.
Gov. Bruce Rauner absolutely refused to budge on negotiating a fully funded state spending plan until the Democrats agreed to some of his anti-union/pro-business agenda. Democrats wouldn’t move off their support for unions. So after more than 12 solid months of stalemate, the two camps finally agreed to a six-month budget for everything but elementary and secondary education funding, which got a full year’s worth of cash.
And even though social services providers and universities only got about half their previous levels of funding going back the last 12 months and forward through December, the stopgap budget money is probably enough to keep both systems from totally collapsing.
It was a reprieve, of sorts—just enough money to keep most of the “budget hostages” alive while the two warring parties retreated back to their corners to fight the upcoming fall campaign.
The stopgap also prevented state government from grinding to a complete halt. Prisons, for instance, couldn’t pay suppliers for everything from water to electricity to food because they haven’t had any official appropriations since the previous June. Without a court order, agencies can’t spend money if they don’t have a legislative appropriation signed by the governor.
Fiscally, however, the stopgap is a monster.
Comptroller Leslie Munger, who pays the state’s bills, told reporters last week that come late December the state will still be paying off invoices from June and it’ll have a total bill payment backlog of $10 billion.
The very same day, the respected and bipartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability projected the stopgap deal has an $8 billion deficit.
You may recall that House Speaker Michael Madigan jammed his own spending plan through his chamber in late May, but several rank-and-file Senate Democrats subsequently revolted and stopped that bill dead in its tracks.
Ever since then, Rauner has been busily traveling the state taking credit for killing Madigan’s bill, always claiming it was disastrously out of balance by about $7 billion.
I Googled “Rauner Democrats $7 billion” and came up with 36,200 results. He really burned that message in, and for good reason. His political operation claims its polling shows a vote for that $7 billion deficit is darned near political death.
But . . . wait. Isn’t an almost $8 billion deficit in a budget he signed larger than a $7 billion deficit in a bill he claimed to stop?
Why, yes, it is.
But don’t tell that to the governor.
“We could be way, way worse off if the supermajority’s budget bill had passed,” Rauner said, speaking of Madigan’s proposal. “We’d be spending at an even higher level than we are today.”
Um, huh?
Never mind, because it probably won’t matter anyway when it comes to the campaign.
The Republicans are all about pinning that $7 billion deficit tag on the House Democrats. And the House Democrats are gearing up to whack Republicans for proposing a stopgap budget plan in late May that provided far less funding for K-12, higher education, social services and health care than was eventually approved by both chambers in late June.
Yep, you read that right. Unless somebody changes their mind, we’re about to witness a big, nasty campaign fight over two bills that never became law. Heck, the Republican stopgap proposal never even got a committee hearing, let alone a vote.
The Republicans will slam the Democrats for attempting to force a budget through that would’ve created such a huge deficit that the personal income tax rate would’ve risen to “more than 5.5 percent,” as a Rauner administration memo claimed last week (issued, by the way, the same day the $8 billion deficit projection was released). The tax rate is now 3.75 percent, after partially rolling back in January of last year from a high of 5 percent.
And the Democrats will slam the Republicans for trying to “slash” every politically popular spending program under the sun.
Why won’t the two sides blast each other for putting us in the hole by $8 billion? Because they actually passed that bill and Rauner signed it into law. Whacking each other for a bill that passed with huge bipartisan majorities just wouldn’t be cricket.
And so we’ll get fairy tales.
…Adding… Related…
* Stopgap budget failing to erase damage of state impasse: The ink wasn’t even dry on a partial budget to keep government running through year’s end when most of the state’s public universities saw their credit downgraded — a signal the deal between Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democrats who control the legislature will do little to erase the damage done by their historic stalemate. Indeed, in the days since the agreement was reached, Southern Illinois University announced it’d still need to lay off workers and cut millions in spending; Lutheran Social Services of Illinois, the state’s largest human services provider, says it will not be able to rehire 750 workers cut during the impasse or restore more than 30 programs that cared for the vulnerable… “The good news is that there is a lifeline for social services and universities,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group. “But it doesn’t allow them to manage their operations in an effective way because it’s not predictable … the damage is continuing.”
