In an exclusive interview with CBS 2 Dennis Hastert said he can deal with the demotion, and that, contrary to many rumors, he will not quit Congress.
“I just think that was wishful thinking on the part of some people,” Hastert said. “Some even had me being an ambassador someplace, which had no founding at all.”
“I’ve made a commitment to run, and I’m going to stay here to get going here, and I can do some things on energy — I think energy is certainly important for Illinois,” he said.
The Better Government Association’s lawsuit that I told you about yesterday has been filed. The BGA is attempting to force the Blagojevich administration to release federal subpoenas it has received from January through July of last year. The time-stamped lawsuit can be downloaded here [pdf file]. The BGA’s press release can be found here [doc file].
Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff said the office is following federal prosecutors’ wishes.
“We have been directed by the U.S. attorney’s office not to discuss or share information about their work in order to protect the integrity of their investigation,” Ottenhoff said.
Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office wrote in October that federal subpoenas are public records, despite requests from prosecutors to keep them under wraps.
“Prosecutors frequently make the request in the subpoena that they keep the document confidential,” Madigan spokeswoman Cara Smith said in an earlier interview. “Just because the subpoena makes a request for confidentiality doesn’t mean it trumps FOIA.”
Smith’s point is exactly correct. Fitzgerald is powerful, but he cannot overrule Illinois law with a request. Besides, the governor’s office won’t even share Fitzgerald’s exact language, so we don’t know what he really said.
I don’t know if he could have won a primary, but a lot of Republicans seemed hopeful that Mark Kirk would take a run at Dick Durbin in two years.
U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk said as firmly as possible Wednesday he won’t run for the Senate in 2008.
When pressed, Kirk chuckled and said he isn’t likely to change his mind “unless I run into a wall at high speed.”
“I’m entirely focused on the 10th Congressional District in Illinois,” said the Highland Park Republican, adding that he is “overwhelmingly likely to run again” for the House in 2008.
One big problem with a Kirk run for the GOPS would have been the likelihood that his district might go Democratic in ‘08. Kirk won with 53 percent last November and Lake County has been moving steadily Democratic for years.
This just gets goofier and goofier. A bunch of university professors ace the state’s ethics exam, prepared by a gubernatorial campaign contributor, but they finished it too fast and now they’re all in hot water.
The president of the school’s faculty association said 65 teachers and 190 other SIU employees are being scolded by state investigators for their performance on an online ethics training course required for all state workers.
The problem wasn’t their scores on the 10-question, multiple choice test. It was that they spent too little time reviewing the subject matter before taking the quiz, according to the Illinois Executive Inspector General’s Office. The “noncompliant” employees have until January 19 to sign a document that says they could lose their jobs if they fail to complete future ethics training.
On average, it took a little more than 30 minutes for about 160,000 state workers to finish the ethics training program. But some — including the SIU professors — plowed through it in less than 10 minutes.
“It’s not humanly possible” that they read and comprehended the information in such a short amount of time, said Deputy Inspector General Gilbert Jimenez. He added that “we’re wondering” if a cheat sheet helped some of the quick studies.
Oh, for crying out loud. We’ve been through this before, but let’s try again. If, as seems obvious, the questions are so easy that you can answer them all after a brief skim of the material, then make the questions more difficult. Don’t insult everyone’s intelligence by forcing them to carefully parse regurgitated crud from last year before breezing through a bunch of blow-off questions.
Of the 32,594 University of Illinois employees who completed the training, 2,341 were told that they finished too fast, said U. of I. spokesman Tom Hardy.
The Inspector General’s office has no way of knowing whether a state employee walked away from her desk while the test was running on her computer, so who’s to say that everybody who took 30 minutes to complete the exam actually studied the content?
Obama was supposed to decide whether he would run for president over the holidays, but he has put off a final decision for a few weeks, according to ABC7’s Andy Shaw, who scored an exclusive interview with Obama yesterday.
Senator Barack Obama said that he has decided to take a few more weeks to make sure that all the i’s are dotted, t’s are crossed, his family is onboard and his gut still says go. Then, assuming all that stays as is, he will soon announce formation of an exploratory committee, which is the first step on the long presidential campaign road.
“We’re still taking a look at it. As soon as I have news to make, you’ll be the first to know,” Obama said.
Senator Obama is back in Washington, D.C., after a family vacation in Hawaii, to finalize his plan to run for president, which is tentatively set to begin with an announcement in the next month that he is forming an exploratory committee so he can start raising money and put a campaign together.
“Until you are actually out there and running, you’re not running. The rest of it is speculation and gossip,” said Obama.
Meanwhile, Washington Post staff reporter Lois Romano finally got around to reading Obama’s first book, published 11 years ago, and realized that he had (gasp!) admitted to drug use.
Obama’s revelations were not an issue during his Senate campaign two years ago. But now his open narrative of early, bad choices, including drug use starting in high school and ending in college, as well as his tortured search for racial identity, are sure to receive new scrutiny.
Running for president puts Obama under a microscope. Just because he admitted using drugs does not put the subject off limits for revisiting. How he answers inevitable further questions could become grist for critics.
Because of the Post, Obama won’t be able to get away with dismissing questions about drugs as an “old story,” a common damage-control tactic.
Even a wisecrack could look different in this new light.
Obama, guesting last month on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” was asked by Leno about taking drugs.
“Remember, senator, you are under oath. Did you inhale?” Leno asked.
Replied Obama, “That was the point.”
Critics could ask why Obama did not add a cautionary “Just Say No” message for impressionable youths.
Also, for you “What about his record?” types who pervade the comment section of just about every blog, WaPo did a piece comparing the voting histories of Hillary Clinton and Obama
*** UPDATE *** Daley tossed in his two cents today.
Mayor Richard M. Daley says past drug use should not be an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. […]
Mayor Daley says drugs have been a problem in all segments of American society for years, and he’s seen many people who’ve recovered from drug use and rebuilt their lives.
Daley says people understand that and “it should not be an issue at all.”
Mayor Daley has had little luck with his annual gun control agenda at the Statehouse, but that doesn’t keep him from trying year after year.
Once again, Daley wants to ban assault weapons statewide, license gun dealers and limit handgun purchases to one a month per person. He also wants to mandate trigger locks in homes whose residents include anyone under 18, instead of 14 as now required. […]
The mayor’s plan would mandate a background check on every gun purchase and require that all transfers be conducted through licensed dealers. Reporting and record- keeping would be the same as required of gun shops. Dealers would be permitted to charge a small fee to cover processing costs. The only exceptions would be gun transfers between spouses, from parent to child or grandparent to grandchild.
The other new proposal would use driving privileges as a lever to punish a wider array of gun crimes. Instead of suspending or revoking drivers licenses only after a aggravated discharge of a firearm, the bill would add such offenses as unlawful use of a weapon, aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and reckless discharge of a firearm.
The larger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have some saying that at least a few of Daley’s ideas could pass, but the pro-gun groups beg to differ.
Todd Vandermyde, Illinois legislative liaison for the NRA, countered that only one of the five new Democratic senators is “definitively anti-gun.” He argued that requiring a firearm owners identification card makes it unnecessary to crack down on private gun sales.
“There’s gonna be a lot of hollering and screaming, but you’ll end up with the status quo,” without any gun control legislation, he said.
I haven’t had a chance to “officially” talk to all of the new legislators since the election, but I plan on doing an interview series for subscribers soon. This would probably be a good question to ask.
* Monitor: Cook County Hiring Needs Extensive Supervision
* Copley: After nearly two years of closed-door study, a privately funded task force is sending a proposed rewrite of the state’s criminal laws to Illinois legislators that would prune the massive code by about one-third.
I’ve been working on this story for much of the afternoon, saving it for the Capitol Fax. I’ll have more in tomorrow’s Fax for subscribers (including a very interesting twist not discussed below) and I’ll post the entire lawsuit on the blog after it’s filed.
The Better Government Association is suing the office of Gov. Rod Blagojevich to get copies of federal subpoenas issued to state government by the U.S. attorney’s office between Jan. 1 and July 24 of last year. […]
The organization’s chief investigator, Dan Sprehe, sent a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents to the governor’s office on July 24. The request was denied and appealed, and denied again by the governor’s office. […]
“Since Governor Blagojevich was first elected in 2002, he’s repeatedly touted his administration’s commitment to transparency and openness, but when it comes to providing some basic information about important issues swirling around his office, we get treated to George Ryan-like stonewalling and denials,” [Jay Stewart, executive director of the BGA, said]. “It’s shameful that this administration, which talks about transparency, can’t respond to a simple freedom of information request. They’re more concerned about spinning the reality than providing basic public records.”
Amen to that, bruddah. Amen.
The lawsuit itself is embargoed until tomorrow, but the supporting documents can be found here [.pdf file], including the original FOIAs, denials, the attorney general’s opinion that the subpoenas are subject to FOIA laws, etc.
Sec. 1. Pursuant to the fundamental philosophy of the American constitutional form of government, it is declared to be the public policy of the State of Illinois that all persons are entitled to full and complete information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts and policies of those who represent them as public officials and public employees consistent with the terms of this Act. Such access is necessary to enable the people to fulfill their duties of discussing public issues fully and freely, making informed political judgments and monitoring government to ensure that it is being conducted in the public interest.
[Comments closed. Go here instead for new and updated info.]
What specific education reforms do you support and why?
While you’re mulling that over, I thought I’d ressurect part of a pre-election subscribers-only post for you today…
A+ Illinois, which has advocated for an SB750-type solution to education funding and property tax woes, has been active in this year’s election. They’re not giving money to candidates, but they are sending out a lot of direct mail and doing robocalls. Here’s an e-mail from an A+ Illinois spokesperson:
We’ve dropped somewhere around $200K worth of mail and robocalls to targeted voters in over 4,000 precincts across roughly ten days.
Our outreach is targeted with far more sophistication than most legislative races. For example, we’ve been able to cross-reference voter registration lists with marketing data to focus our message on registered voters who are parents with children under the age of 18 in the home. […]
In addition to the direct mail and robocalls, we’ve obtained the e-mail addresses for roughly 1/4 of the voters we’re targeting, and they’ll be getting 2-3 emails from us in coming days
I’m told we can expect this group to spend a ton of money next spring. Here’s pretty much their entire mail program:
The Daily Herald interviews new deputy governor Sheila Nix, a major favorite of this blog’s commenters.
After some background questions, Nix was asked if the governor would “cave” if pressure mounts to sell the Tollway…
He will not. He is very, very pleased with the progress of the tollway and obviously, especially Open Road Tolling. It’s made people’s commutes easier. It makes it easier to get home to their families. And so, I think the governor would like to keep that as a state asset.
She dodged several questions about whether the administration’s tone would move away from confrontation, claimed the administration was following Freedom of Information Act laws (gag… not), and then the topic turned towards corruption…
Q. Are you confident there will be no more indictments in a second term?
A. Yeah, I don’t feel like we’ve had any indictments.
Q. (Blagojevich top fund-raiser) Mr. Rezko was indicted.
A. There’s been nobody in the governor’s office, you know, that’s even implicated in any wrongdoing.
Q. So you’re confident no one will be indicted?
A. Yes.
She may have to eat those words (maybe even soon), but let’s not speculate about names or agencies in comments, please.
No surprise here. Hizzoner says “No” to debates. Daley hasn’t debated anyone since he first won the office in 1989.
…There is no need for Daley to engage in a public debate since he has answered more questions than any local elected official during his nearly two-decade reign, campaign manager Terry Peterson said Friday.
Plus, Peterson said, the proposed debates are “nothing more than a political strategy of our opponents to get their names out there.”
“For the most part, the people of the city know where the mayor stands on the issues,” he said. […]
“I think this is another example of the ‘Daley double,’” said Brown, Cook County Circuit Court clerk. “On one hand he tells the people of Chicago he is going to take responsibility, but then he turns around and arrogantly snubs his nose in the face of the voters by saying he will not discuss the issues with the other candidates. He wants to hide from people.”
On the one hand, Peterson is right. We know where he is on most issues. On the other hand, debates, done well, are a healthy part of democracy. The mayor should be pinned down on the issues, forced to talk about the future, forced to defend his legacy.
Supporters of allowing primary voters in Illinois to keep their party affiliation secret say they hope lawmakers will listen to the outcome of a number of local referendums held in November.
In more than 20 township advisory questions across the state, voters said they support a so-called open primary system by no less than 78 percent. The movement, spearheaded by Springfield attorney Sam Cahnman, who lost his race as a Democratic challenger for a state representative seat, was intended to get the Legislature to act. […]
About 20 states use a variation of the open primary system. Some states have seen court challenges to such rules.
The powers that be have always opposed open primaries, and Chris Mooney from UIS has his theory about why.
“Political parties need that information,” Mooney said. “The party people and the people running for office can go down to the county courthouse and get a list of their voters. It helps them strategize.”
The other, more philosophical reason, is that legislators are, for the most part, party creatures. “Closed” primaries force voters to decide which party to “join,” at least for that election. Perhaps the real problem happens when primary turnout becomes so low that too few people are deciding who will run in the fall.
I don’t really know what kind of ground game that Naisy Dolar is putting together in Chicago’s 50th Ward, but she is actively using the Internet, including posting videos on a regular basis. She also has a MySpace page. Dolar is hoping to defeat broken-down aldermanic warhorse Bernie Stone.
Dog Fight in the 50th seems to have an anti-Dolar bent, but is doing fairly frequent updates on the aldermanic race.
Greg Brewer , an architect and community organizer, is the other major candidate in the contest. He’s also posting videos on YouTube.
Meanwhile, Dick Simpson has the coming aldermanic campaign just about right.
The intersection of several factors could lead to 15 or more competitive races involving incumbent aldermen, according to Dick Simpson, a former alderman and current political science professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. These factors include a strong pool of candidates and increasingly active unions and community organizations, he said. […]
According to Simpson, the strong showing of Republican Tony Peraica in a number of city wards during his heated contest against former alderman Todd Stroger for the Cook County Board presidency is one indication of this disruption. Peraica won 12 of the 50 wards outright, and carried a significant percentage in many others. Stroger beat Peraica in the contest for president of the Cook County Board.
While not directly linked to the city elections, the unusually strong support for Peraica could be taken as a sign that voters are seeking a change in the status quo within local government. […]
“You have to have a credible challenger and there are better challengers than there have been since the ’80s,” [said] Simpson. “Most of them have had time to position themselves and do the early fundraising, which is different from most years.”
And as I’ve told you before, SEIU is gearing up for battle.
The Service Employees International Union is one organization trying to flex its muscle in February. It has targeted incumbents in several wards -including Ald. Emma Mitts (37th) for opposition to the Big Box ordinance - and plans to place its support behind candidates considered more supportive of key union issues. SEIU officials are still in the process of determining which candidates will receive their attention. The SEIU is also recruiting “block captains” from its 78,000 Chicago members to canvass their neighborhoods for the elections, the first time the union has done so.
Do you have any local races in your area? If so, give us an update.
When the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago released its budget and tax hike blueprint several weeks ago, most mainstream media reporters and columnists never picked up on the fact that the group specifically recommended that the “tax swap” idea be dumped. I wrote about it, and the Southtown gave it a brief mention, but until John McCarron’s Tribune column during the holidays, none of the bigs had really broached the subject.
That muffled “thud” we civic wonks discerned a few weeks ago was neither a sonic boom nor rooftop landing of reindeer on a practice run.
It was another crash landing of the so-called “tax swap”–the complicated proposal for state fiscal reform that has been the centerpiece of the liberal-progressive agenda hereabouts for more than a decade.
Not that the swap is dead dead. Like Mr. Dumpty, it could be reassembled and offered once again this spring to the Illinois General Assembly. In fact, civic types already are busy with the glue. They are practiced at repair, having kept the swap idea alive since its initial tumble in 1997, when then-Senate President James “Pate” Philip shoved it off the wall.
The nudge this time came from the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. These are the corporate chieftains who, nearly a century ago, commissioned Daniel Burnham’s seminal Plan of Chicago. More recently they led the charge to expand O’Hare International Airport. They have clout.
McCarron supposes that the federal tax deduction for property taxes provides an incentive to keep the property tax system in place. I think there is also a legit worry for families who move to areas with good, expensive schools that if the state takes over primary funding the government will screw up their kids’ futures.
Meanwhile, a big push for a big tax hike is coming soon to a General Assembly near you.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich has pledged not to raise the state income tax and won’t back down, his staff said.
But a new, bipartisan caucus of lawmakers wants to bolster state aid for per-student spending by more than $1 billion, and it is expected to include a state-tax hike in its education proposals.[…]
The [legislative] education caucus’ goals include reducing reliance on local taxes for schools. That system creates inequities because wealthy districts can afford to spend more on schools than poor districts.
The caucus also wants to increase state aid guaranteed per student to a level recommended by the Illinois Education Funding Advisory Board. Currently, that recommended figure is $6,405 per child, but the advisers plan to update that in 2007. This school year, the per-pupil amount is $5,334. It would take an estimated $1.6 billion to move to the $6,405 figure.
But Jim Edgar and Dawn Clark Netsch, among others, are skeptical that anything will happen this year.
“I’ll be awfully surprised if something happens,” said former Gov. Jim Edgar, who believes a tax hike is necessary because of the state’s financial problems. “The governor has said he is adamantly opposed to any tax increases. It’s awfully difficult to get a major tax increase when the governor indicates he is opposed to it.” […]
“You’re going to have a lot of legislators say, ‘Why should I stick my neck out on a tax increase if the governor is going to veto it?’” Netsch said. “He (Blagojevich) has the bully pulpit more than anyone else. He has got to be willing to be involved.”
Ralph Martire, who has made a career of pushing for a tax swap plan that nets the government lots more money, is more optimistic, first noting that Senate President Emil Jones is already in favor of providing more cash for schools, then adding…
“If (House Speaker Michael) Madigan becomes engaged, it will become a priority to the state,” Martire said.
And in that event, Martire said, even Blagojevich might be convinced to go along, no-tax-hike pledge or not, because education also is one of his top priorities.
If the governor’s people injected politics into federally funded IDES job placements, there could be real trouble afoot.
Federal authorities have questioned current and former employees of a state agency already under fire for alleged hiring irregularities and political influence, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Unfolding over the last few weeks, the interviews concerning the Illinois Department of Employment Security show that the sweeping investigation into state hiring continues to dog the administration of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, even as it prepares to embark on a second term in January. […]
Agency employees who have been questioned said federal authorities are asking whether they know of any cases in which politics played a role in hiring and promoting people into jobs that were supposed to be free of political influence. […]
The employees said investigators asked specific questions about alleged violations of what is known as the Rutan decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that most state hirings, promotions, transfers and firings should be free of political influence.
Also in the piece…
Employees interviewed this month said they are unclear why federal investigators waited this long to seek them out.
It sometimes takes a long time for the federal wheels to turn. But they rarely stop turning once they start.
Meanwhile, some merit comp employees could be up for a raise soon.
An estimated 6,000 nonunion state employees would be eligible for performance-based pay raises in the new year under an emergency rule filed Friday by Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s administration.
In the not so old days, post-election raises for many workers would be based at least partly on political performance. I certainly hope that with the feds watching over their shoulders the administration doesn’t try anything stupid.
Sen. Obama told the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board that he had never done any favors for Tony Rezko.
Obama added that he had never “done favors for [Rezko] of any sort. Most of the time, I’ve never been in a position to do favors for him. I don’t control jobs. I don’t control contracts. There were no bills that he was pushing when I was in the state legislature that I know of or that he talked to me about. And there were no bills in federal legislation that he was concerned about, so there was no sense of the betrayal of the public trust here.”
Then, over the holidays the Tribune ran a story entitled “Obama intern had ties to Rezko” in which we learn that Obama gave a 20-year-old a five-week internship answering phones and logging mail.
“Mr. Rezko told the senator of John Aramanda’s interest in an internship and asked that he be considered,” Gibbs said. “Sen. Obama advised him to contact the office, which he did. The application was put into the internship pool, where it was considered, and he was eventually offered an internship. Rezko did provide a recommendation for John.”
Hardly blockbuster material. Tom Bevan over at Real Clear Politics (not exactly the center of the Obama for President campaign) called the Tribune story a “joke” and a “gotcha” piece in a recent posting.
Please. If we went and made a federal case over every Congressional internship that’s been doled out over the years to the child of a friend or political contributor we’d run out of trees and ink by next Thursday.
Backlash to the blacklash?
Meanwhile, the LA Times had a decent backgrounder on Obama the other day, including several quotes from his colleagues in the Illinois state Senate. But this was the best paragraph, I thought.
Just a generation ago, when Harold Washington was campaigning to become the first black mayor of Chicago, he and Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale attended Sunday Mass at St. Pascal’s, a white Roman Catholic parish in Northwest Chicago. They were spat upon, cursed and lucky to leave unharmed. In his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama carried every precinct but one in St. Pascal’s Portage Park neighborhood. Talk to people who live there now and you could get the impression that Obama grew up one block over.
