* I interviewed Senate President Don Harmon earlier this month and he told me about the axe-throwing outings with Republicans. From Brian Mackey’s interview this week…

Mackey: I understand you and your fellow Senate Democrats invested a lot of time to try and build some areas of consensus with Republicans this spring. Did that actually start with an axe throwing outing in Springfield? Is that true? Did I read that correctly?

Harmon: It did. Somewhat organically, we were looking for opportunities to get together out of the Capitol, off campus and just socialize, get to know each other as people. And someone came up with the idea of going axe throwing on MacArthur Boulevard in Springfield. We ended up doing it several times in small groups. And I don’t give that all the credit for a good working relationship with the Republican caucus this session. But it’s certainly disarming when you get to play together a little bit in that context.

Mackey: Oh, ‘disarming.’ It’s going to come thick now, because I was gonna say something about axes to grind. Speaking of which, ultimately, you ended up not getting any Republican votes on the budget. Why, from your perspective, despite some effort, I understand and that was thought of to be a possibility, from your perspective, why didn’t that come together?

Harmon: Well, I do want to be clear, we’ve worked with the Republican caucus from the beginning. We involved them in the budget conversations all during the spring session. And frankly, we have a better budget because of it. There’s much input from the Republican caucus in our budget. In the end, we weren’t able to get the votes on the budget from Republicans. We weren’t able to cross the divide on a couple of non budgetary related items that they thought were precursors to supporting the budget. But I’m not discouraged. I think it was a process worth undertaking. And we’ll do it again next year.

Mackey: What did you learn about bipartisanship from this spring legislative session? Is that still a worthwhile goal? Because I mean, you’ve been in the Senate long enough, you know that that hasn’t always been the dominant, sort of prevailing attitude among senators.

Harmon: It validated for me my belief that bipartisanship is almost always better. There are certain issues where we’re just never going to see eye to eye. And that’s okay. In those cases, we have a strong majority elected by the people of Illinois and we’ll pursue those in a partisan fashion. But on the routine business of governing, we are always better off with a bipartisan coalition. And Brian, you know, 95 percent of what we pass in a typical session is bipartisan or unanimous. But on the tough issues, if we can get good people from both sides of the aisle to sit down eyeball to eyeball and work towards a compromise, we almost always get a better product.

Please pardon all transcription errors.

* The Question: Do you have any suggestions for future Senate bipartisan outings? Snark is not exactly encouraged, but allowed since it’s a Friday afternoon in late June.