You know what, Mike, here’s what I think’s going on. I don’t know for sure, but, um, the Speaker’s main lieutenant Lou Lang two years ago said, ‘You know what, we’re never gonna have a budget for four years.’
He told you what they really want. They want chaos. They want mayhem. They’re happy to hurt whoever they need to hurt because, and now they’re being honest again.
I think it was the Senate President who came out and said, ‘You know what, the governor can’t be reelected unless there’s a budget.’ He said that publicly.
You see where they’re going? You see what this is about? They’re damaging communities like Hegewisch. They are damaging human services for political gain.
Bruce Rauner has been at the state’s helm since last January, which means he’ll be governor for at least another two and a half years. Back in May, Democratic State Representative Lou Lang remarked:
“That it was entirely possible that there would not be an agreed budget during the entire four years of Bruce Rauner’s governorship.”
Lang says he doesn’t want that. But, he says, it’s possible.
* Now, here’s Senate President John Cullerton’s recent quote…
“He’s been spending time working on his commercials and his campaign instead of governing,” Cullerton said. “And the irony is, he would actually have a better chance of getting elected if he would’ve passed the budget. Without a budget, this guy is toast.”
…Adding… I really thought this was self-explanatory, but for the slow out there, here’s the point: Cullerton was saying that if the governor would spend less time campaigning and more time getting a budget, then, ironically, that would actually help the governor get himself reelected. Rauner twisted that to say that Cullerton deliberately killed a budget deal to continue doing damage to the state, thereby hurting the governor’s reelection chances.
* A very reliable union source says that the Illinois AFL-CIO executive board just voted to endorse JB Pritzker for governor.
More when I know more.
* Here’s how the voting reportedly went…
19 yes
7 no
2 abstained (part of the total)
3 unmarked (not part of the total)
The 2/3 requirement was 19.
*** UPDATE 1 *** From Liz Utrup at the Kennedy campaign…
Chris Kennedy has always believed that union labor provides a competitive advantage for Illinois’ economy, that includes the working men and women of the AFL-CIO. The members work hard every day to support their families and build a stronger, better state for our children. Unfortunately, today’s endorsement isn’t about the members. It’s about Springfield establishment insiders who cut deals and circumvented the normal endorsement process. As Governor, Chris Kennedy will continue his career-long support for the labor movement and its role in building America’s middle class. He will fight to make sure every family in Illinois can realize the potential of the American Dream. He will take his message of radical change directly to members of the AFL-CIO and the people of Illinois because they should determine who the Democratic nominee is— not political insiders who are cutting deals behind closed doors.
*** UPDATE 2 *** Ameya Pawar…
I have always been, and will always be a steadfast supporter of organized labor and collective bargaining rights. As a Chicago alderman, I partnered with labor organizations to pass paid sick leave, raise the minimum wage and combat wage theft. If elected governor, I will bring that same commitment to supporting labor and working families across Illinois. Endorsements or non-endorsements won’t change that.
*** UPDATE 3 *** Illinois AFL-CIO President Michael T. Carrigan…
“The Illinois AFL-CIO Executive Board voted today to endorse JB Pritzker in the Democratic Primary Election for Governor.
“The Board followed a process that included meeting with the candidates and evaluating issue questionnaires. An early endorsement is necessary in order to achieve our top priority in 2018 – defeating Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose anti-worker proposals and refusal to compromise on a budget are destroying Illinois.
“Pritzker has the vision and background to put Illinois on the right track by empowering working families, not shifting more power and wealth to corporate class.”
* JB Pritzker campaign…
Today, the Illinois AFL-CIO endorsed JB Pritzker for governor. The Illinois AFL-CIO represents nearly 900,000 members across the state and is a powerful voice for Illinois working families.
“I am honored to receive the endorsement of the Illinois AFL-CIO and the working families they represent across our state,” said JB Pritzker. “As governor, the labor movement will always have a seat at the table and will be a partner in our work ahead. I will always stand up for collective bargaining rights and prevailing wage, protect retirement security and pensions, and ensure safe working conditions and pay equity for working families.
“We have our work cut out for us. Over 700 days into a historic budget crisis, Bruce Rauner continues to attack our working families instead of doing his job as governor. Our social services and public education system are on the brink of collapse, but Rauner is focused on dismantling collective bargaining rights, cutting pensions, and opposing prevailing wage. The AFL-CIO and the working families it represents deserve a real leader in Springfield who will always stand with them to get our state back on track. I look forward to being that governor for Illinois working families.”
* Sen. Daniel Biss…
“The working people of Illinois deserve better than being told they have to support a billionaire whose family fortune was enriched by anti-union behavior. As Governor of Illinois, I will always put the interest of the working men and women of Illinois ahead of money and the machine.”
*** UPDATE 4 *** As we’ve already discussed, AFSCME Council 31 wasn’t a fan of endorsing this early. I asked the union for a statement…
Our process is driven by our members. We have an obligation to follow that process to vet the candidates, their records and priorities, and to hear from our members about what direction they wish to take. That process will conclude with a decision to endorse or not in the Democratic primary.
A nonprofit designed to help with upkeep at the Illinois state fairgrounds plans on selling naming rights to fair buildings to help pay for improvements.
The Illinois Fairgrounds Foundation is in negotiations with corporations for naming rights to various buildings, Chairman John Slayton told The (Springfield) State Journal-Register. The foundation hopes to raise $3 million to $5 million a year to pay for improvements, he said.
“It will start to pick up soon,” Slayton said. “The naming rights are going to be our biggest dollars.”
* The Question: Your own corporate naming rights suggestions?
* In a 2,300-word piece about how Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Statehouse operation is lousy, we find this buried paragraph…
Of course, there’s a limit to what any one politician—even one as experienced as Emanuel—can accomplish long-distance, particularly in a state and a party so dominated by the likes of Madigan and an opponent as entrenched as Rauner. And with Emanuel’s backing, City Hall in the most recent legislative session scored some wins around crime, school funding and a bump in the city’s 911 tax, while close lieutenants such as Michael Sacks worked the back channel to move some pension and tax measures forward. That said, the standoff in Springfield constitutes an emergency of epic proportions for the city of Chicago, and yet its chief executive has remained away from the public front lines in the fight.
The article compares Emanuel unfavorably to Richard M. Daley, but Daley always talked a big game on gun bills and never really delivered. Emanuel got his gun crimes bill passed over the strong opposition of some Black Caucus members. Not an easy feat, to say the least.
The author breezes past the school funding issue, but, again, this was a huge piece of legislation. Yeah, it’ll probably be vetoed, but if they can ever get the talks back on track, evidence based funding will be very beneficial for the city’s schools. We now have a template for an eventual agreement.
And that “bump” in the city’s 911 tax will take pressure off local property taxes for police and fire pensions. The bill passed with lots of Republican support, even though it was labeled a Chicago “bail out” by the governor’s people. Again, that wasn’t easy.
Also, Sacks was in Springfield almost constantly during the final days of the session. He worked like crazy on that school funding issue, among other things.
“One of the things I’ve been saying to folks is, if this were any other year, where the budget negotiations weren’t part of the discussions, you would have to say, this has been a really bellwether year from the General Assembly, in terms of progress on K-12 school funding, pension reform, procurement reform, they’re making progress on worker’s comp reform — maybe not as far as people want it to go, but they’re making movement on some of these things that have been pretty much intractable issues over the years,” [Jak Tichenor, interim director at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute] said.
They also got an agreement on automatic voter registration, plus a ton of other stuff.
* If there was no impasse, Emanuel and others would probably be lauded for this spring session. But there is an impasse, and Chicagoans think their mayor is supposed to be all powerful, so he’s getting some of the blame.
Could Emanuel do more? Heck yes he could. In my opinion, the mayor needs to go to his friend John Cullerton and urge him to somehow get the grand bargain talks back on track and offer to help any way he can.
A top Chicago political consultant who asks not to be named says that after that scandal and the continuing federal investigation into how the Police Department and the Emanuel administration handled the case, the mayor “has less political capital to spend,” so not getting involved in Springfield’s dysfunction is a risk worth taking. “From both a political and time-management perspective, it’s not the worst decision if a high-profile person like the mayor is not involved in the budget talks, because if you lose, it’s not necessarily a reflection on him, but on Springfield. You don’t want that lack of success splashing on you,” the consultant says. “The mayor’s pretty calculating that way.”
He is indeed a calculating man. Too calculating, if you ask me.
But another reason is one that existed long before the police reform issue caught fire: Emanuel’s lack of clout. The previous two Daley administrations had iron-bound ties to Springfield because father and son were both major power brokers in the Democratic Party and with Republicans. Richard J. served 10 years in the state House and Senate before becoming Cook County Democratic chairman and then mayor; Richard M. was an Illinois state senator for eight years. That experience translated to power once they presided over City Hall because legislators understood that to survive re-election, they had to give Chicago’s mayor what he wanted.
Wait. I thought those were supposed to be the bad ol’ days. Careful what you wish for.
So far it appears that Emanuel has left city lobbying to the Department of Intergovernmental Affairs. Collins, his spokesman, will not say who is in charge of such lobbying, and phone calls to the department were not returned. Michael Rendina stepped down last year to become Emanuel’s senior adviser.
A court hearing scheduled for Tuesday has the potential to shake up Illinois’ already-precarious financial situation. Organizations that run the state’s Medicaid program are asking a judge to speed up their payments.
There are a lot people and organizations in line to be paid by state government. The Medicaid providers are asking a federal judge to put them at the front of it.
The thing is, Illinois spends a lot on Medicaid. Comptroller Susana Mendoza says letting those groups cut in line means Illinois would soon run out of money.
“We’ll have to go to the courts and ask them: ‘OK, out of all of these court-mandated payments, which ones am I allowed to violate?’” Mendoza says.
Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier days before last year’s presidential election, according to a government intelligence report leaked Monday that suggests election-related hacking penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than previously known.
The classified National Security Agency report, which was published online by The Intercept, does not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results. But it says Russian military intelligence attacked a U.S. voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials at the end of October or beginning of November. […]
The document said Russian military intelligence “executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016 evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions, according to information that became available in April 2017.”
The hackers are believed to have then used data from that operation to create a new email account to launch a spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations, the document said. “Lastly, the actors send test emails to two non-existent accounts ostensibly associated with absentee balloting, presumably with the purpose of creating those accounts to mimic legitimate services.”
A new published report suggests a vendor for the Illinois elections board might have been compromised by Russian hackers seeking to attack voting systems here and in other states.
Russian hackers attacked the voting-software supplier days before last year’s presidential election, according to the classified National Security Agency report.
The report, published online by The Intercept, does not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results. But it says Russian military intelligence attacked a U.S. voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials at the end of October or beginning of November.
The company involved has contracts in eight states: Illinois, California, Florida, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, according to The Intercept. It was unclear whether any officials in Illinois might have received spear-phishing emails.
Illinois election officials acknowledged to The Washington Post last year that they discovered “an intrusion” into the state’s election system in July, months before the November election.
Though the manufacturer victimized by the attack has its name masked throughout the report, contextual clues imply that it might be VR Systems.
The email account used to spearphish customers is listed as vr.elections@gmail.com, and the attack made use of malware-infected files with titles that reference to the EViD poll book system. The report makes reference to voter-registration themed phishing attacks against third parties possibly using information from the account, making it likely the company is somehow related to registration or voter roles.
VR’s website says EViD products were used in California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, New York and Virginia. The company is based in Florida.
The NSA document alleges the GRU have hacked the voting systems company using a false Google alert requiring a target to enter login credentials. According to the report, it also attempted a parallel campaign using a false email account meant to be confused with a second company.
The report does not claim that voting machines were hacked, a once-popular post-election theory from Democrats, nor does it state whether the information pertaining to the voting systems could be used to hack those systems.
The EViD system is a network of electronic devices at voting sites communicating with each other and with the county’s voter registration system. The electronic devices—EViD stations—allow poll workers to quickly check in voters during early voting and on election day.
A voter’s voting history is transmitted immediately to the county database, eliminating the massive effort for post-election processing, and concerns about multiple votes.
With the EViD system, there’s no need for printed poll books: all the information you need is on the EViD. To check in a voter, the poll worker swipes their photo ID on an EViD station or types their name and birthdate on the onscreen keyboard. Using the ID data, the EViD system verifies the voter’s eligibility. Then it requests the voter’s signature on the electronic sig pad, and checks them in to vote.
But a more worrying prospect, according to [Mark Graff, a digital security consultant and former chief cybersecurity officer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab], is that hackers would target a company like VR Systems to get closer to the actual tabulation of the vote. An attempt to directly break into or alter the actual voting machines would be more conspicuous and considerably riskier than compromising an adjacent, less visible part of the voting system, like voter registration databases, in the hope that one is networked to the other. Sure enough, VR Systems advertises the fact that its EViD computer polling station equipment line is connected to the internet, and that on Election Day “a voter’s voting history is transmitted immediately to the county database” on a continuous basis. A computer attack can thus spread quickly and invisibly through networked components of a system like germs through a handshake.
Touting his independence from Democratic Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, Democratic north suburban state Rep. Scott Drury on Tuesday announced a bid for the party’s nomination for governor.
In a press release, Drury noted that several candidates have declared their candidacies but that Drury sees the contest as a two-way race: Those with “demonstrated loyalties to the Madigan machine” versus him.
“I like those odds,” Drury is quoted as saying in the release.
* The full press release…
SCOTT DRURY TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR
DECLARES THIS IS NOW A TWO-WAY RACE
Highwood, Illinois – This morning, Scott Drury officially announced he is running for governor. “For too long, Illinois has been defined by public corruption and a lack of honesty,” said Drury. “I am running for governor to bring honest change to Illinois and return Illinois government to its rightful owner – the public.”
According to Drury, Illinois’ brightest days are ahead of it. People are yearning to break from Illinois’ past and elect leaders who will be their voice. As governor, Drury will rebuild the foundation of trust between government and the public that has crumbled in the Madigan era and, more recently, under Bruce Rauner. With this strong foundation in place, Illinois can construct its promising future.
Drury is widely recognized as the most independent Democrat in the Illinois General Assembly. In January, Drury became the first Democrat in three decades not to vote for Mike Madigan for Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. Drury attributes his independence to his unique background. Unlike many Illinois politicians, Drury was not “next in line” when he first ran for office. Prior to running, Drury was an Assistant U.S. Attorney where he successfully prosecuted corrupt public officials and worked to rid neighborhoods of illegal guns, among other things.
Drury is not concerned about other candidates who have claimed to be the independent Democrat in the race. “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery,” quipped Drury. “I can assure you that when I took the bold step of not voting for Madigan, none of those candidates called to thank me or ask how they could help the effort to return Illinois government to the people.”
As for the amount of money likely to be spent in the race, Drury acknowledged that he has not inherited billions of dollars. According to Drury, money cannot buy character or judgment. “While my colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office and I were fighting to rid Illinois of public corruption, the current presumptive frontrunner was cozying up to corrupt Governor Blagojevich for an appointment,” said Drury. “That type of small thinking is the polar opposite of what Illinois needs right now.”
While many people have declared their intention to seek the Democratic nomination for governor, Drury sees it as essentially a two-way race: those with demonstrated loyalties to the Madigan Machine versus him – the only candidate with a proven record of standing up to Illinois’ most powerful politicians and giving a voice to the people. “I like those odds,” said Drury.
* He also has a video…
It's time for honest change. That is why I am running for governor. Learn more: https://t.co/ij9VpoCKWH
For far too long, politicians in Springfield like Bruce Rauner and Mike Madigan have hijacked Illinois government to serve their own interests, not yours. Today, I am launching my campaign for Governor of Illinois so the people of our state have a candidate with a proven track record of fighting corruption and standing up against a gridlocked system to advocate for the people.
Follow the Leader: Crisis Creatin’ Rauner Gains New Recruits in the State Legislature
Republican Rep. Admits “We Have To Create A Crisis”
Chicago, IL — Bruce Rauner’s fixation on creating crisis in Illinois is gaining support among members of his own party. On Monday, an NPR Illinois report quoted a Republican member of the state legislature as saying:
“We have to create a crisis. And it is going to be a crisis. I don’t want the schools not to open. But we’ve tried everything else.”
The staggering admission is nearly a direct echo of Rauner’s now infamous “crisis creates opportunity.”
It comes 706 days into a budget impasse where the cost of their “crisis” has become all too clear. Working families are suffering so Bruce Rauner can create the “opportunity” to force a special interest agenda that the people of Illinois continue to reject.
“While schools are being starved for funding and social service agencies are closing left and right, Bruce Rauner remains committed to forcing his agenda on Illinois through a crisis of his own creating,” said Pritzker campaign spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh. “Instead of standing up to their failed leader, Republicans are letting Rauner continue to drive this state into the ground. Illinois must reject Rauner’s failed leadership and hold him accountable to pass a budget for our state.”
Um, first of all, the quote is by Rep. Bob Pritchard, a Republican from Hinckley. Pritchard is more independent than most House Republicans and actually likes the Democrats’ school funding reform bill that Rauner opposes.
Secondly, the governor has gone out of his way to avoid any K-12 shutdown. As I explained in my syndicated newspaper column, the “crisis” has to be contained to stuff people don’t hugely care about, like universities, bond ratings and the poor. If it spreads to K-12 schools, people are gonna freak and Rauner knows it. He won’t be able to continue the impasse if this happens.
Thirdly, by Pritzker’s own logic, liberal, pro-union state Sen. Dave Koehler (D-Peoria) is a Rauner “recruit” who wants to help the governor create a massive crisis…
No funding for local school district by the end of the summer might finally be enough to bring an end to a state budget impasse entering its third year, a local lawmaker suggested Friday.
“I think that’s the pressure point,” state Sen. Dave Koehler said during a news conference at his Labor Temple office. “… I think that if it takes closing the schools down in September to get this crisis resolved, then that’s what it takes.”
“The Secretary of State’s local Department of Motor Vehicles is open. You can go get your driver’s license renewed. … The lights are still on at most every state facility. That’s true, but this invisible ratcheting up of debts and the backlog of bills continues, pretty much out of sight, out of mind,” [Jak Tichenor, interim director at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute] said.
The state racks up $2 million in late-payment penalties each day it goes without a budget, Mendoza said in February. Illinois currently owes $14.5 billion in unpaid bills.
The bulk of the state’s financial obligations are being spent “on auto-pilot” by court orders and administrative arrangements, Tichenor noted. But the state is operating on the FY 2015 income tax rate, which decreased to 3.75 percent after a temporary tax hike expired.
“So we’re spending roughly as much as $39 to $40 billion a year, while we’re only taking in around $32,” he said. “… It’s like you’re trying to pay your rent with your credit card. There’s only so long you can do that.”
The Senate’s budget plan cut about $3 billion from state spending. Without a real budget, spending will continue to rise uncontrollably. The governor continues to sign contracts for services and goods without appropriations, while other spending rises “naturally” and can’t be pulled back in.
Group Health accounts for roughly 32 percent of all outstanding bills—a significant issue because state lawmakers have not allocated any money to these liabilities for the past two years, and as a result these bills (as well as the interest penalties) continue to pile up. And remember the interest penalties don’t stop racking up until the bill is actually paid. Backlogged Group Health liabilities have skyrocketed from $3.1 billion in April 2016 to $4.6 billion in April 2017, and there’s no end to their growth in sight. Some bills are being paid 734 days (or 2 years) late, and that number is only going up.
The Comptroller’s office has estimated that if the state was able to pay its entire bill backlog right now (which it can’t) it would have to also pay $800 million in interest penalties. Compare that to the total amount of interest penalties the state paid between 2003 and 2015: approximately $1 billion. But the state isn’t going to be able to pay all of its bills at once, and the impasse has yet to be resolved, meaning the backlog of bills and penalty payments are both likely to increase further.
This means that whenever lawmakers do decide to end the impasse, the scope of the problem is going to be much larger than it was in 2015. And in the time between, with our non-budget budgets, we’ll have put ourselves in an even worse position to start paying them off.
* From the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation…
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to hear a case that could free government workers from being forced to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.
Forcing government employees to pay money to union officials to keep their jobs violates the First Amendment, argues plaintiff Mark Janus in the case Janus v. AFSCME. Janus is a child support specialist from Illinois, whose lawsuit was brought by attorneys from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and the Liberty Justice Center.
The request for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear this case follows a March ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, which upheld forced dues and fees based on the Supreme Court’s 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision. The plaintiffs in Janus v. AFSCME argue that Abood was wrongly decided and should be overturned, especially in light of subsequent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have applied strict scrutiny to mandatory union fees.
Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, issued the following statement about the case:
“For too long, millions of workers across the nation have been forced to pay dues and fees into union coffers as a condition of working for their own government. Requiring public servants to subsidize union officials’ speech is incompatible with the First Amendment. This petition asks the Supreme Court to take up this case and revisit a nearly half-century-old mistake that led to an anomaly in First Amendment jurisprudence. By applying the principles the Court laid out in two recent cases brought for workers by National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys – Knox and Harris – the Court can end the injustice of public sector forced dues by the end of next term.”
Jacob Huebert, senior attorney at the Liberty Justice Center, described what is at stake in the Janus case:
“People shouldn’t be forced to surrender their First Amendment right to decide for themselves what organizations they will and won’t support just because they decide to work for the state, their local government or a public school. This case gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to restore to millions of American workers the right to choose whether to support a union with their money.”
Mark Janus works for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services and is forced to send part of his paycheck to AFSCME. He said, explaining why he brought the case:
“I went into this line of work because I care about kids. But just because I care about kids doesn’t mean I also want to support a government union. Unfortunately, I have no choice. To keep my job at the state, I have to pay monthly fees to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a public employee union that claims to ‘represent’ me. I’m filing this case on behalf of all government employees who want to serve their community or their state without having to pay a union first.”
In addition to Janus v. AFSCME, six other ongoing cases brought by workers with free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation are challenging public sector forced dues. These cases represent the full spectrum of public employees, including teachers in Pennsylvania, school aides in Kentucky, university professors in Massachusetts, medical center technicians in California, school electricians in New York and state troopers in Connecticut.
Janus’ case is the first of that group to reach the Supreme Court. The case is on track for the Supreme Court to decide whether to hear it at its first conference of the term beginning in the fall. If four justices agree, the Supreme Court could announce soon after its September 25 conference that it will hear the case.
AFSCME President Lee Saunders called the case an effort to chip away at the power of unions “to negotiate a fair return on our work, provide for our families, and lift up the concerns of all working families.”
Last year, the issue split the court’s liberal and conservative members during oral arguments in the California case. Several conservative justices, including Scalia, seemed ready to scrap Abood. They said bargaining issues like teacher salaries, merit promotions and class sizes are all intertwined with political issues involving the size of state budgets and how taxpayer dollars should be spent.
While unions avoided a loss after Scalia’s death, Gorsuch is seen as equally conservative, though he has not expressed views on the issue of fair share union fees.
For unions, the loss of millions in fees would reduce their power to bargain for higher wages and benefits for government employees.
“This is an aggressive litigation campaign aimed at undermining unions’ ability to operate by forcing them to represent people for free,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School specializing in labor law.
The Illinois AFL-CIO holds a regularly scheduled meeting of its leaders in Springfield on Tuesday, with trade unions expected to push for an unusually early endorsement in the Democratic primary for governor, sources said.
J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire investor and entrepreneur, has the backing of several major trade unions, and they want the labor umbrella group to endorse him now in an effort to try to narrow a field of candidates that also includes businessman Chris Kennedy, state Sen. Daniel Biss of Evanston and Northwest Side Ald. Ameya Pawar.
But some service unions — ones that have some of the most direct involvement in state government under Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner — have been urging a wait-and-see attitude while the race develops. Some think that the contest needs to play out longer and that their unions have established procedures for making political endorsements.
The three public-sector unions that reportedly want to take more time to review the field are AFSCME, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and SEIU.
“We’re not going to vote ‘yes’ for any endorsement tomorrow,” said AFSCME spokesman Anders Lindall. “The feedback we’ve received from our members is that Bruce Rauner has been a disaster. But we’re just at the beginning of our process” of backing a Democrat.
Local SEIU chief Tom Balanoff has made similar comments.
IFT isn’t saying anything, but knowledgeable sources say the group’s board does not favor an early endorsement.
This is not a weighted vote. It’s a headcount roll call. And there are a ton of trade and craft unions out there.
Despite some pushback within labor and protests from fellow Democrats, the state’s umbrella group for organized labor, the AFL-CIO, is preparing its endorsement vote today. There was significant arm-twisting behind the scenes in the last several weeks, but two sources again told us that if the vote is called today, that means the votes are there for J.B. Pritzker.
Subscribers know more.
*** UPDATE *** From the ILGOP…
“It’s clear that this is an attempt by Mike Madigan to coalesce Chicago machine support behind his preferred candidate, J.B. Pritkzer. Madigan knows Pritzker is a fellow crooked insider who will raise taxes and support his Chicago agenda.” – Illinois Republican Party Spokesman Steven Yaffe
This morning, Politico Illinois is reporting that J.B. Pritzker has the votes to receive the AFL-CIO’s endorsement – a whopping 288 days before the Democratic primary, before any debates, and without a proper vetting process.
Politico notes “there was significant arm-twisting behind the scenes in the last several weeks.”
It’s clear this is an attempt by Mike Madigan to coalesce his insiders and special interests around a crooked candidate who will play ball with his Chicago agenda.
After all, J.B. Pritzker is already on tape showing his corrupt colors.
WLS: But, certainly, I mean, even your own family, the rich history, the political history of the Kennedy’s, you’re no stranger to backroom dealings.
KENNEDY: On an FBI wiretap? I mean, please, please. I don’t think there’s anything in the history of the Kennedy family that looks like that… The Kennedy’s have never done that. Please, don’t lump us in with that behavior.
“The Kennedy’s have never done that.”
Really?
* Look, I freely admit that I’m a Kennedy family fan. My grandmother met JFK at a Teamsters’ Union event in Chicago in 1959. The future president hugged her, kissed her on the cheek and told my grandfather that he had a beautiful wife. You couldn’t say a cross word about any Kennedy in front of my grandma after that, and she lived well into her 90s.
But, I mean, come on. I can think of a dozen nefarious things that the Kennedy family was involved with which trump that silly little Pritzker FBI tape. Joe Kennedy and booze running and Hitler? Chappaquiddick? William Kennedy Smith? The anti-vaccer Robert Kenndy, Jr.? Need I go on… and on… and on… and on… ?
Bob Pritchard, a Republican state rep from Hinckley, serves on five different education committees, and was on Gov. Bruce Rauner’s school funding reform commission. You could say education is one of his key issues. But on the state’s 700th day without a budget, he called on schools to close.
“We have to create a crisis. And it is going to be a crisis,” he said. “I don’t want the schools not to open. But we’ve tried everything else. There’s been all kinds of lobbying groups down here, talking about higher education, talking about mental health, talking about elderly services and child care services, and it doesn’t move the needle.”
Pritchard helped develop the school funding plan (he was chief co-sponsor of the major school funding initiative that passed the House), but when it came time to vote, he didn’t. Republicans called the plan a Chicago bailout, and most voted no. But Pritchard says the plan just needs work, and there’s no way he’d vote against it.
No funding for local school district by the end of the summer might finally be enough to bring an end to a state budget impasse entering its third year, a local lawmaker suggested Friday.
“I think that’s the pressure point,” state Sen. Dave Koehler said during a news conference at his Labor Temple office. “… I think that if it takes closing the schools down in September to get this crisis resolved, then that’s what it takes.”
I’m pretty sure Koehler said the same thing last year at around this same time.
Sen. Steve Stadelman, D-Rockford, said what is likely to happen is passage of a stopgap spending bill that keeps state services running for six months or a year.
“We’re going to have to find a way to make sure schools open and universities get funding. The governor agreed to a stopgap-spending bill last year, and if we can’t get a full budget passed then our focus has to be on that,” Stadelman said.
We now need 71 votes for a budget so it’s harder, but I not giving up. I’m not going to blame the Democrats, the Republicans or the Governor. I’m simply going to keep moving forward to push for a deal.
One pressure point is funding for our schools. If our schools don’t open due to funding, the people will, I hope, rise up like never before. All people from all areas of the state need to rise up and demand a budget. And if that happens, the legislative branch and the executive branch will have to bow to that pressure and we will get a deal.
As such, I will not support a stopgap measure to fund the schools. We either get a full balanced budget now or the schools should not open.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley said Monday that Russian operatives hacked into the State Board of Elections last year to view voter database files, a potential move toward trying to make voters distrust the state and federal election system.
“The Russians hacked into the Illinois State Board of Elections,” Quigley said after a meeting with the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.
“They got into the database,” he said. “I believe they’re on the doorstep to hacking into our voting systems. That is my educated guess.”
“I’m not saying I know they’ll do this, (but) think about what you could do. You could check and say, ‘Oh no, all these people already voted, or these people voted absentee.’ Once you get into that, then there’s all kind of mischief,” Quigley said. […]
[Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the State Board of Elections] said the state elections board does not tabulate votes, something that occurs in each of the state’s 102 counties and seven special local elections boards. Any toughening of tabulation would involve those local election officials. Menzel said that the manipulation Quigley theorized about would have minimal effect on balloting compared to normal human error at local precincts.
Menzel is right. The primary security focus should be on local elections boards, particularly the big ones like Chicago and Cook County.
* Should the Illinois AFL-CIO endorse a candidate for governor this week or wait a while? Click here to take the poll and then explain your answer in comments, please.
* I’m told by the Pritzker campaign that there will be additional calls into Senate districts later this week. Press release…
Today, the Pritzker campaign released new robo calls targeting Republican and Democratic districts across the state. They aim to make it clear that Bruce Rauner is holding the state budget hostage while corporations line their pockets and working families suffer. The robo calls are part of the multimedia Crisis Creatin’ Rauner campaign, holding Rauner accountable for this crisis of his own making and the families, schools, and social service agencies that continue to pay the price.
The statewide robo calls will target all of the same Democratic districts that the Illinois GOP hit in their latest robo call and will also target the following Republican districts: HD-41 [Wehrli], HD-42 [Ives], HD-45 [Winger], HD-61 [Jesiel], HD-68 [Cabello], HD-71 [McCombie], HD-76 [Long], HD-79 [Parkhurst], HD-81 [Olsen], HD-95 [Bourne], HD-97 [Batinick], HD-99 [Wojcicki Jimenez], HD-115 [Bryant], HD-117 [Severin].
“The ILGOP has run unchecked distraction campaigns for years to hide Bruce Rauner’s staggering failures, but not anymore. Illinois families deserve to know why Bruce Rauner has failed to pass a budget for three years in a row as he drives this state into the ground,” said Pritzker campaign communications director Galia Slayen. “Bruce Rauner continues to blame everyone but himself for this manufactured crisis, but the truth is this has been his plan all along. While Rauner holds this state hostage for his special interest agenda, we will continue to hold Rauner accountable for the damage he inflicts every day.”
We’re the only state that has gone this long without a budget… over 700 days.
For the third year in a row, Bruce Rauner is holding this state hostage and Republicans in the legislature are blindly following. They aren’t serving us. They’re letting corporations, insurance companies and wealthy CEOs line their pockets while the rest of us pay the price.
Tell Republicans it’s past time to do their job and negotiate. Illinois deserves a budget.
For over 700 days, Bruce Rauner has failed to do his job and pass a budget for the people of Illinois.
Schools are scraping by, domestic violence shelters are closing, and Illinois is over $14 billion in debt. But Bruce Rauner continues to hold the state hostage for his right wing agenda.
Democrats have tried to reach across the aisle to get a state budget passed while also protecting the services so many families rely on, but Bruce Rauner continues to stand up for corporations and the wealthy, even while Illinois families pay the price.
Call the governor at 217-782-0244 and tell him enough is enough. It is time for him to do his job and negotiate a fair budget for Illinois.
Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford, said the fundamental problem is the increased power of fringe elements of both parties, on the left and the right.
“It’s not impossible to reach an agreement, but it must have bipartisan support. For the last two to three weeks, the kooks on the far right and far left have been banging on legislators, trying to convince them there’s a painless solution,” Syverson said. On the right, lobby groups are saying all that’s needed are spending cuts, and the left’s lobby groups are saying just raise taxes. The middle ground that always controlled the debate and governed near the political center has weakened, he believes.
That’s not the whole story, of course. Republicans were indeed spooked by the hardliners. And the only way the Republicans “in the middle” were going to be able to successfully fend off those “kooks” was if Gov. Rauner got on board. But, as we all know by now, the governor either wasn’t able or willing to close the deal and he pulled his party out.
The Democrats also had their issues with unions and the trial lawyers, but they still managed to pass a fairly decent package of legislation over to the House. If Speaker Madigan had been finally put on the spot by a unified, bipartisan front and a package was signed into law, most would be forgiven.
[Rep. Litesa Wallace, D-Rockford] said the House attempted to pass some of Rauner’s reform plans as a measure of good faith, such as a property tax freeze, “but he changes the goal posts every time. I personally have voted 14 times for property tax freezes.”
And every one of those freeze bills was phony. The Senate Democrats, who were actually trying to work out a deal, never picked up a single one of those House bills, which should tell you something.
The House did pass a bipartisan permanent freeze bill, but that was in the lame duck session and too late for the Senate to take action. The House didn’t pass that bill again in the spring, when it could’ve mattered.
With a desire to start a serious discussion about the many large issues facing the State of Illinois, State Representative Tim Butler (R-Springfield) has introduced House Joint Resolution 68 which would allow the question of calling a state Constitutional Convention to be on the 2018 Illinois General Election ballot.
“We have now gone over 700 days without a real budget in our State, and last week we once again ignored our mandated deadline to get something done for the people of Illinois,” Rep. Butler said. “I have heard so many of my colleagues, as well as citizens around the State, say that we need changes to our Constitution to truly move forward, and that is the main reason why I have introduced this call for an Illinois Constitutional Convention.
“Next year will represent a half century since Illinois’ last Constitutional Convention was called and our State faces challenges today not envisioned by convention delegates 50 years ago. I believe it is time the citizens of our State once again have the ability to provide their say on if they want to change our Constitution through a comprehensive convention.
“Since 2008, the last time the Constitutional Convention question was on the ballot, legislators have introduced over 400 resolutions to amend the Constitution. These proposed amendments run the political gamut. Legislators elected on behalf of the people, spanning the spectrum of ideology, believe our Constitution needs changes. Whether it is a graduated income tax or pension reform, term limits or drawing legislative districts, home rule or school funding, I believe a Convention is the best way to hash out these concerns.
“2018 is the bicentennial of Illinois statehood. Over our state’s history, six Constitutional Conventions have been called, including on our 50th, 100th, and 150th anniversaries of statehood. As we put 200 years of statehood behind us, I can think of no better time to examine our state’s governing document and enable a discussion about the constitutional solutions we need for moving this state forward into our third century,” Rep. Butler said.
Butler’s legislation is House Joint Resolution 68 (in honor of 1968 being the last time a Constitutional Convention was called). According to the Illinois Constitution, and as stated in HJR 68: “Whenever three-fifths of the members elected to each house of the General Assembly so direct, the question of whether a Constitutional Convention should be called shall be submitted to the electors at the general election next occurring at least six months after such legislative direction”. Butler’s resolution, if approved, calls for that proposition to be placed on the ballot.
The Illinois Senate moved on that monumental question this session, but with such a transparently cynical move to turn it into an unjustified windfall for Chicago that it is sure to be vetoed by Gov. Bruce Rauner.
Chicago Democrats used the issue as a means to maneuver a bailout of the mismanaged Chicago Public Schools system that for years has wildly overspent while overpromising its powerful unions.
Unfortunately, many Democratic legislators from the suburbs shamefully went along.
* Media advisory…
Lawmakers and members of the Just Democracy Illinois coalition of civic and voting rights groups will gather on Tuesday for a press conference to celebrate the passage of Senate Bill 1933 to create automatic voter registration (AVR) in Illinois. Gov. Rauner has pledged to sign the bill in the coming weeks.
SB1933 reforms current registration laws so that whenever an eligible Illinois resident applies for, updates or renews a driver’s license or state ID, he or she will be automatically registered to vote or have their registration updated, unless they opt out. It also creates a similar program for other state agencies, such as the Department of Human Services and the Department of Natural Resources.
The achievement of bipartisan agreement on legislation dealing with elections is remarkable in the midst of partisan tension in Springfield. The legislation passed the Senate on May 5 with a 48-0 vote, with 22 Republicans and 26 Democrats voting in favor. In the House, the AVR bill was cosponsored by members of both parties, and passed 115-0, with 66 Democrats and 49 Republicans voting in favor. Representative Mike Fortner (R-West Chicago) was a chief co-sponsor and sponsored the final amendment to the bill.
Just Democracy Illinois is led by a steering committee that includes Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago, CHANGE Illinois, Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Chicago Votes, Common Cause Illinois, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and Illinois PIRG.
“We are a disaster,” declares Rauner, who rattles off Illinois’ shortcomings at each campaign event: four of the last seven governors sent to prison, about $5 billion in overdue bills, one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S. and the worst credit rating of any state.
Past due bills now stand at $14.655 billion, about triple the “disaster” level from 2014. And we still have one of the highest unemployment rates in the US and we still have the worst credit rating of any state.
Hoping to thwart Chicago Tribune owner tronc, a former Chicago alderman and a suburban hedge fund manager are expected to step up with competing bids for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader, according to multiple sources.
Monday is the last day prospective bidders may provide an initial offer, according to an agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Wrapports Holdings LLC, parent company of the two publications. If an acceptable offer is not received by 5 p.m., the daily Sun-Times and the weekly Reader are on track to be sold to tronc, which signed a letter of intent last month.
Sources have confirmed at least two groups — one led by the former alderman [Edwin Eisendrath] and the other led by the hedge fund manager [Thane Ritchie, CEO of Ritchie Capital Management] — have made their interest known to the Justice Department and Wrapports. Others also may come forward. […]
Eisendrath’s partners in the group expected to bid for the papers, sources said, include the Chicago Federation of Labor, an umbrella organization for about 320 unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO in Cook County.
“The Chicago Federation of Labor, SEIU and other labor unions are very concerned and interested in ensuring that Chicago remains a two-newspaper town and other progressives are interested in this as well,” a source with knowledge of the bid involving labor told POLITICO. The coalition has “great interest that the Chicago Sun-Times remains an independent, free-standing institution. We have no faith the Chicago Tribune will do that.” […]
The Department of Justice’s Antitrust division is telling potential bidders there could be a scenario in which the highest bid doesn’t necessarily prevail, according to a separate source who is exploring a bid apart from the two cited above. That source said Monday’s deadline could be extended. The antitrust division is overseeing the Sun-Times sale.
Chicago billionaire Neil Bluhm’s family is interested in buying the Chicago Sun-Times in a face-off that could pit the real estate magnate against Chicago Tribune parent Tronc, according to sources familiar with the discussions. […]
Bluhm ranked 204th on Forbes’ list last year of the wealthiest people in the country and is third-richest in Illinois.
In addition to being a co-founder and chairman of Chicago-based Rush Street Gaming, he is a co-founder and managing principal of real estate investment firm Walton Street Capital and a co-founder and president of JMB Realty, according to a biography on the Rush Street website. […]
Bluhm has been a big contributor to Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and may believe his ownership would better preserve the historically left-leaning bent of the Sun-Times.
The Chicago News Guild, the union representing newsroom workers at the Sun-Times and Reader, has been opposed to a Tronc-Wrapports deal. The union has launched a “#NoNewsMonopoly” Facebook page and Twitter hashtag campaign.
The page gives folks the ability to choose one of 3 agencies in the state for the profits from the T-Shirts to go to. They are $12, which will make the profit on the shirts about $7 each.
Just trying to make some lemonade out of lemons.
BTW, on the back the shirt says…
“Profits from the sale of this shirt supports The Women’s Center in Carbondale, Rape Advocacy Counseling and Education Services (RACES) in Urbana, and The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.”
I didn’t want to take any other stance on the back of the shirt, because the point is to raise money for the Services Providers and if I make it too partisan, I might eliminate half my customer base.
* Sen. Bill Brady doesn’t want the governor to call a special session. Instead, he thinks the Democratic leaders should order members back to town…
“Because the legislature failed to do its job, (House Speaker) Mike Madigan and (Senate President) John Cullerton should call us back at our own expense and force us as leaders of their chambers to sit down and pass a package that rebuilds this state and that includes a balanced budget,” Brady said.
The Bloomington Republican told WJBC’s Scott Laughlin and Patti Penn the state would have to pay for lawmakers travel, housing and meals if a special session was called. He said that’s not necessary to continue budget talks.
“One of the reasons is (Rauner) thinks it’s the legislature’s authority to do their job,” Brady said. “If he calls a special session there are per diem checks that are issued. It shouldn’t be the taxpayers responsibility for the legislature to do its job.”
Brady added if Democrats had agreed to a longer-term property tax freeze, the Grand Bargain might have succeeded and he said it still might before the next budget year begins July 1.
This essentially boiled down to a disagreement over a two-year freeze bill sponsored by the Senate GOP Leader and the governor’s four-year freeze bill. So, two years of a property tax freeze was the difference between getting a real budget and continued chaos. Let that sink in a bit.
* The governor said last week that he could’ve signed Sen. Andy Manar’s education funding reform bill, but that’s not how pretty much everyone else saw it when Manar finally pulled the plug in disgust with the pace of negotiations and ran a different bill.
He should’ve taken the deal on workers’ comp when he had the chance.
He should’ve taken the deal on the budget and stopped complaining about how it didn’t quite balance two years from now. Sheesh, man, do your own job for a change.
* This will never get resolved until the governor cuts a deal with the Senate. All the special sessions in the world will accomplish little more than allow the two sides to score political points.
Nothing has changed since January. Do a deal with the Senate and then put extreme and unrelenting pressure on Madigan or this ship of fools state sinks to the bottom.
The governor crows about being persistent in his quest for meaningful reforms. But his doggedness has done real, lasting damage. Has this businessman-turned-politician not noticed that his budget-less state has a credit rating about to scrape bottom? That talented young people are avoiding Illinois colleges? That we’re losing population?
It’s time for Rauner to seize anything that even hints of a step toward his legislative agenda, label it as progress and then offer up a real budget plan that has a chance of proceeding — with or without Madigan. Lawmakers are ready. They’re feeling the heat.
The AFL-CIO may call on members to take an endorsement vote in the Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday… After we reported last month that the AFL-CIO was poised to back J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire was hit with a series of negative reports, including revelations that he had taken property tax reductions on his Chicago mansion and, most recently, that he had asked imprisoned Gov. Rod Blagojevich in 2008 to name him to a state post.
Given these revelations, we asked around whether key backers were nervous. The answer we received was a resounding “no.” Pritzker invested heavily in opposition research on himself before he launched his bid for governor and he and top supporters had an idea of what could be coming at him, according to one high-ranking Illinois Democrat.
So will the AFL-CIO back Pritzker? On Sunday, the Tribune’s Rick Pearson reported that SEIU’s Tom Balanoff called for the AFL-CIO to remain neutral in the primary. However, one of our sources remained confident of the AFL-CIO backing regardless, putting it this way: With all the intensity and pressure wrapped up with endorsing in June for a 2018 election, a union leader isn’t going to call a member vote for Pritzker — unless he has the votes for Pritzker.
As of now, two sources tell us the vote is Tuesday.
* JB Pritzker is the gift that keeps on giving for opposition researchers and reporters. Just click here for a taste of what the ILGOP has already made public about Pritzkter’s ties to Rod Blagojevich. Here’s one of them…
Patti Blagojevich met with J.B., looking for job, just as Rod Blagojevich was trying to sell Illinois’ US Senate Seat.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported, “On Oct. 6, Blagojevich met with officials of the Pritzker Family Foundation, which has $65 million in assets. Among those at the meeting was foundation president J.B. Pritzker, one of several candidates the Chicago-Sun Times has reported the governor was considering to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate.”
As you also already know, the following month Pritzker’s conversations with Blagojevich were caught on FBI surveillance. Some of those conversations have already been divulged by the Tribune.
Superior was one of the first banks in the 1990s to turn to the emerging practice of subprime lending, where loans are targeted to high-risk borrowers at higher interest rates. Recipients of those loans often have loan delinquency or default histories, bankruptcies or limited debt experience, and by the middle of this decade, they began defaulting on their new mortgages. A dramatic rise in those defaults and foreclosures is blamed, in part, for the recent financial crisis.
* And then there’s the Pritzker family’s enthusiastic use of offshore trusts to lower their tax liabilities…
While many wealthy families go to great lengths to avoid taxes, the Pritzker family (most famous for it’s ownership of the Hyatt hotel chain) is unique in its role as “pioneers” in the use of offshore tax shelters. Many of its existing offshore trusts were set up as long as five decades ago, and some have allowed the family to continue benefitting from tax loopholes that have long since been closed.
As the graphic below from a 2003 Forbes story details, one of the primary ways the Pritzker family uses offshore trusts to avoid taxes is by having income from their businesses funneled into offshore trusts. Those trusts then pay debt service to a bank, owned by the family trust, that loans that money right back to the business. The upshot is that all the taxable profits disappear and the family wealth accumulates unabated. A more recent Forbes article looking at the Pritzker family fortune notes that these trusts were not at the margin but rather “played a substantial role in the growth of the Pritzker fortune.” The same article notes that this fortune makes up the vast majority of [Penny] Pritzker’s $1.85 billion empire and has allowed 10 members of the Pritzker family to earn a spot on the list of Forbes 400 richest people in America.
The I.R.S. called the trusts sham and insisted that the Pritzkers owed the government $53.2 million in taxes. In 1994, however, the government settled with the family, which paid a mere $9.5 million plus interest. At the time, the I.R.S. had been unable to discover exactly how much was in the trusts—the family had made sure they were protected from outside scrutiny.
Their wealth is almost incalculable, because according to Forbes magazine, they are the only family in America to have off shore tax-free trusts because they were grandfathered in. Their off shore trust can ship money back to their family tax-free. It was grandfathered in because their grandfather got it through Congress – he was smart to see the future and got it done. Congress closed the loophole and grandfathered him in. Forbes magazine wrote about the Pritzker’s off shore trust, they emphasized that there are over 1000 separate trusts.
One only knows what that road will eventually lead to.
* And, of course, there’s the scandal which erupted when Pritzker’s young cousin Liesel sued the family for a billion dollars…
The first hint of trouble came last November [in 2002]. Just before Thanksgiving, Robert’s 19-year-old daughter, and Jay’s niece, Liesel Pritzker—a Columbia College freshman and an actress who starred alongside Harrison Ford as the president’s daughter in the 1997 movie Air Force One and who is currently appearing in the Broadway play Vincent in Brixton—filed a lawsuit in Chicago against her father and all the Pritzker cousins. Setting off an explosion of publicity, she accused her family of looting her trust funds and those of her 20-year-old brother, Matthew, in a way that was “so heinous, obnoxious and offensive as to constitute a fraud.”
The amount of money which Liesel claimed was taken from her was staggering—$1 billion—and she not only demanded it be returned, but asked the court to award her $5 billion in punitive damages. It was a stunning lawsuit, not just because of the money involved, but also for the questions it raised about the Pritzkers.
Emphasis added because that could be a heckuva TV ad. The lawsuit was eventually settled.
I found all that stuff - and more - after just a couple of hours idly surfing the Internet one recent Saturday morning. Just imagine what a determined opposition researcher with a hefty budget could find.
* Gov. Rauner on a bill for an elected Chicago school board while speaking last week to WBEZ…
Despite veto-proof majorities in both the House and the Senate, Rauner said Friday on WBEZ’s “Morning Shift” that he doesn’t believe HB 1774 will reach his desk. This comes a day after he told Chicago Tonight that even if the bill does make it out of the General Assembly, he would likely be unwilling to sign it as is.
“My sense is that’s more for political spin. I don’t think that’s coming to my desk,” Rauner told “Moring Shift” host Tony Sarabia. “We’ll see what passes the General Assembly and deal with it at the time.”
When asked by Sarabia if that means he is opposed, in general, to an elected school board in Chicago, Rauner answered: “I wouldn’t say that. I think the devil is in the details.” […]
[Rep. Rob Martwick, who authored the initial bill] said he’s worked to include legislators from both sides of the aisle in discussions while drafting the bill, and included about half of the six suggestions House Republicans offered to help tighten up the legislation.
“So for (Rauner) to say that sort of stuff, he’s either playing politics himself or he’s just never followed the bill or the bill process,” he said. “I think it’s a good bill, it’s going to wind up on his desk. Political spin is ridiculous.”
The governor also says he would veto a plan approved on Wednesday that would take away the mayor’s authority to appoint the CPS board, and instead letting voters choose leaders for the state’s largest school district, as it’s done everywhere else in the state.
Rauner, a frequent advocate of “local control” and just as frequent critic of unions, says he can’t sign the legislation because it doesn’t have “safeguards to make sure that special interest groups who make their money from the schools don’t control the elections and control the board.”
Observers predict that if CPS were to have an elected board, the powerful Chicago Teachers Union would make a strong play for seats.
“Well I’d like to see that restriction about special interest groups everywhere. But that already exists. Chicago, Chicago needs to have a truly … freedom away from the special interest groups.”
* The Senate once again revised the House bill, but this time Speaker Madigan’s spokesman says those were agreed changes…
Steve Brown, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s spokesman, said Friday that leaders in both chambers had discussed them and appear to be on the same page.
“I expect it to be supported when we reconvene,” Brown said of the elected school board legislation. […]
[Sen. Kwame Raoul], who sponsored the bill in the Senate, noted the bipartisan support in both chambers as a sign the governor will actually support it.
“I think if the governor wasn’t going to support it, it probably wouldn’t have happened, “Raoul said. “The things he’s not going to support don’t get that much support from the Republicans.”
The Senate’s version passed 53-2, with Republican Sens. McConnaughay and Rezin opposed.
Tio Hardiman, Democratic Candidate for Governor 2018
Dear Members of the Media,
After securing 125,500 votes, winning 30 counties downstate, and 28.1 percent of the statewide vote in the March 2014 Democratic Primary,
Tio Hardiman has decided to run for Governor in the 2018 Democratic Primary. “The 2018 Democratic Primary is wide open for a regular candidate like Tio Hardiman. We must say no to billionaires like Chris Kennedy, JB Pritzker, and Bruce Rauner. Bruce Rauner is one of the worst Governors in the history of Illinois. Anybody can beat Rauner in the General Election. “- Tio Hardiman
Hardiman for Illinois Platform Issues will include:
• Supporting Legal Gun Owners
• Increased Funding for Domestic Violence Shelters, Mental Health Facilities, HIV Awareness Programs, and Violence Prevention Services
• Create Jobs
• Reduce Gun Violence Statewide
• Increased Funding for Public Schools
• Unify Democrats and Republicans on Key Issues
“Anybody can beat Rauner in the General Election”? Hubris always comes before the fall.
Hardiman, the former director of a Chicago-based anti-violence organization, didn’t come close to beating Quinn in 2014. Still, after Hardiman survived a ballot challenge, he didn’t have an awful showing against the incumbent.
Hardiman won 28 percent of the Democratic-primary vote. According to Hardiman’s news release, he won 30 of the state’s 102 counties. But Hardiman’s showing in a relatively low-profile campaign might have been more a statement about Quinn’s lack of popularity than anything else. […]
Hardiman also considered a run in 2016 as a Democrat against then-incumbent U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican.
“I plan to give Mark Kirk the biggest run of his life,” Hardiman told WMAQ-TV (5) in Chicago.
That didn’t happen. Then-U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth won a three-way primary that didn’t include Hardiman. Duckworth went on to defeat Kirk handily in the general election.
May 31st is supposed to be the last day of the legislative session, but that deadline has been meaningless for the last two years. This year is no exception. I am beyond disappointed in our failure to find a solution yet again. Once again, we have failed to pass a budget and the carnage of this standoff shows more clearly every day. Our human services system has been nearly destroyed, our higher education institutions are hemorrhaging money and staff, and those least able to afford it are enduring most of the pain.
It is easy to get bogged down in the confusing daily minutiae of this historic failure, so I will try to provide a thousand-foot view for the sake of perspective. When Governor Rauner took office two years ago, he demanded we pass a series of union-busting, non-budgetary reforms before he would agree to any budget deal. A former executive in the private sector, he has never seemed willing or able to grasp the fact that because lawmaking is a system of checks and balances he must negotiate with Democrats, who control both legislative chambers. I personally negotiated two bills with Governor Rauner’s administration in his first year in office (HB218 & HB494), passed them, and watched him veto both after moving the goalposts.
He has demonstrated a callous willingness to crush the state’s social services, using poor folks and children in the public school system as fiscal hostages to leverage “reforms” that would by his own accounting save us only a small fraction of the state’s expenditures. Our bill backlog has nearly tripled since Governor Rauner has taken office, and the payment cycle has ballooned from around 30 days to around 6 months.
The Governor isn’t wrong that we need reforms, and Democrats are certainly not blameless in this awful ordeal. That is why the Senate worked for months on bipartisan reforms to education funding, local government consolidation, worker’s compensation, pensions, and more. These talks intentionally excluded both the Governor and Speaker Madigan, as all previous discussions including the two of them have produced nothing but shameless political posturing and wasted time. Eventually, despite reaching negotiated bills with their Republican colleagues, the Governor killed the talks by convincing Republican Senators to vote in opposition because he didn’t get everything he wanted. Though the bills contained many of the provisions sought by the Republicans, including painful spending cuts and significant reforms, Senate Democrats were forced to pass the bills themselves.
As a House appropriations chair and a member of the budget negotiating team for the House Democrats, I advocated for our caucus to send that package back to the Senate with some progressive changes even if we could not count on Republican support. There is plenty to dislike about the package sent over by the Senate and I heard from many constituents concerned about specific cuts and policy changes, but ultimately we need a fully funded budget. We have gone as far as we can go on patchwork solutions. With every “lifeline” and “stopgap” we pass, someone is left out or underfunded and the source of those funds simply cannot sustain the whole state.
On May 30th, a group of deeply passionate advocates ended a weeks-long march to Springfield from Chicago to protest this injustice. They conducted a sit-in outside the Governor’s office, demanding that he and Speaker Madigan put aside their posturing and remember that what we do, or fail to do, has massive impact on the everyday lives of Illinoisans. I stayed late into the night to stand witness with three colleagues as they were dragged away, one by one, arrested for trespassing. It was a deeply emotional scene, and one that reinforced my resolve that these political games must end.
As work wound down on May 31st, Speaker Madigan announced that we would schedule public hearings of all the House Appropriations committees and keep the House in session in June to seek a resolution before the end of the State’s fiscal year on June 30. I would not have chosen this path. I forcefully advocated for my colleagues to take the politically risky but morally correct vote and send a balanced budget to the Governor. But passing a bill requires 60 votes, and there were not 60 members of either party willing to take that vote. Now that we are beyond the May 31st deadline, the rules require that anything we pass must get a super-majority to take effect immediately. This means that any budget we pass will require participation by the Republicans to get 71 votes.
I expect that the hearing schedule will be finalized shortly and will provide an update as soon as it is available. I want to believe that the Governor and Speaker Madigan understand that we cannot continue to destroy our state, piece by piece. I absolutely agree with a member of House Republican leadership who recently publicly stated that we have already done more damage to the state than any “reforms” can fix.
I will continue to advocate as forcefully as possible that it is past time to simply do the right thing and pass a budget, politics be damned.
* From a letter to the editor by Rep. Barbara Wheeler (R-Crystal Lake) and posted to her website…
Today, another spring legislative session ended, and with it ended another opportunity to stop the financial death spiral gripping Illinois. Despite the efforts of many rank-and-file members to create a balanced budget compromise, Illinois’ rigged political system has once again superseded good governance.
Over the past year, I took part in working groups and special commissions to address the budget crisis and the pressing need to reform Illinois’ school funding formula. These good faith discussions and negotiations were more productive than I expected and I was optimistic about the legislation we began to put together. Staying positive in Springfield these days isn’t easy, but it seemed like a ray of hope was finally beginning to shine.
Sadly, Speaker Madigan once again wielded his power to pull the rug out from under these efforts at the last minute. It’s clear that even though the methods of the past aren’t working anymore, the Speaker is more interested in keeping control of the process, whatever the cost. His own leadership team has suggested on multiple occasions that there won’t be a full budget during Governor Rauner’s term. This is not how our Republic is supposed to work. Meanwhile, taxpayers, job creators and those in need of certainty for social services will continue lose out.
We can still pass a balanced budget before the current fiscal year ends on June 30, albeit through a more restrictive process now. Failure to do so will cause even more services to stop. We must stop the political games and do what’s right to pass a balanced budget built on reasonable reform before it is too late.
Webster-Cantrell Hall’s emergency shelter care program for homeless teens is closing at the end of the month after the state ended funding for three of the eight available beds.
The shelter, at 1220 Underwood Court, just north of Mound Road, served youths ages 12 to 18 who didn’t have a place to stay. With a lack of similar shelters in the region, those teens will have to be taken to Chicago, said Holly Newbon, Webster-Cantrell director of development.
“They’re (Department of Child and Family Services) wards who have been kicked out of foster care, run away from another residential program or they were just on the streets,” Newbon said. “DCFS could call day or night and place a youth there. “We would bring them in and provide case management and therapy. We’d work with them to find appropriate placement.” […]
“The majority of the youth there were from Central Illinois,” Newbon said. “Now they’re going to be taking them to Chicago, where the per diem rates are higher and the cost of service is higher, not to mention the travel. It’s very sad.”
Newbon said Webster-Cantrell will try to place most of the staff from the shelter in new jobs but between eight and 10 employees would lose their job.
House Speaker Michael Madigan was his usual self during the final week of the General Assembly’s spring session, passing bills to make one point or another, but not actually accomplishing anything.
Bills are routinely moved in the House for the sole purpose of creating TV ads, or direct mail pieces or newspaper headlines. Madigan’s only real ideology is maintaining his majority, and he doesn’t consider that to be a bad thing. And maintaining that majority has been inextricably tied for two long years to stopping Gov. Bruce Rauner at every turn, despite Madigan’s repeated claims that he’s cooperating and that Rauner should just accept a win and move on.
But whatever else you can say about Madigan, he’s not wrong about that last part. The governor could’ve accepted a two-year property tax freeze proposed by both Senate Democrats and Republicans as a down payment on reform. That freeze would’ve gotten him through the 2018 election and he could’ve warned voters that the Democrats would never pass another freeze if he was defeated.
The Senate’s freeze proposal even included provisions for local referendums in 2018 to let voters decide whether or not to keep their freezes. That would’ve helped the governor gin up turnout among his Republican base next year.
But Rauner wouldn’t compromise with the Senate and here we are with nothing.
Gov. Rauner constantly derides the “headline” bills which Madigan loves. But Rep. Steve Andersson (R-Geneva) was totally right when he told Chicago Magazine’s Whet Moser: “At this point, there’s not enough reform to counter the damage we’ve done to the state in the past two years.”
Rauner’s own four-year property tax freeze coupled with workers’ compensation insurance reform that would’ve saved maybe $120 million in Illinois’ $700 billion economy could’ve done some good two years ago. But now, the reforms are little more than political cover.
Those reforms won’t come close to making up for the damage already caused by running a government on court-ordered autopilot and then compounding the problem by signing state contracts that can’t be paid. We as a state have starved our universities nearly to death, devastated the social safety net and, in the process, piled up billions of dollars in unpaid bills, including the $1.1 billion currently owed to K-12 schools that the state has no way to pay anytime soon.
Rauner’s reforms also won’t do much of anything to ease the damage from the much-needed “cure.” The longer Illinois waits, the higher the taxes will have to rise and the deeper the cuts will have to go.
In other words, this whole thing on both sides is a grotesquely fake Kabuki dance.
Madigan’s reforms are lip service at best and Rauner’s “real” reforms won’t come within a solar system of his overly promised “booming” economy.
So, now what? The attorney general’s attempt to overturn a judicial order that state workers be paid without a legal appropriation appears hopelessly stuck in the courts. University layoffs have exceeded 1,500 and lasting damage has been inflicted upon their reputations, but that hasn’t moved the Statehouse needle an inch. Thousands upon thousands of the poorest and most vulnerable among us have been kicked to the curb and nobody seems to care. Our bond ratings are ridiculously low and are going lower, but it’s being shrugged off.
The only thing that literally everyone is deathly afraid of is a K-12 school shutdown. There’s a reason why Gov. Rauner vetoed everything out of the budget passed in 2015 except K-12 funding. The same goes for including K-12 in the last-minute 2016 stopgap funding deal.
As long as they can “contain” the damage, the warring parties can continue their bizarre dispute. But a school shutdown would literally bring out the torches and pitchforks.
The governor has said repeatedly that he won’t sign a partial budget without permanent property tax relief and term limits, which puts him in a horrible box. But a flip-flop would likely go mostly unnoticed if schools open on time.
Will the Democrats pass a partial budget for schools? I assume the House would. Speaker Madigan seems to prefer this war.
The Senate Democrats might be another story. They could impose the terms of surrender during an extreme crisis because their chamber has already courageously approved those terms – a budget, revenues and reforms. They may have to step up again and refuse to do a stopgap and finally bring this thing to an end.
…Adding… Mark Brown on what the final agreement may look like…
I think the difference is that the eventual budget will more closely resemble a version Cullerton had been prepared to put to a vote earlier that better reflected Republican preferences.
When it became apparent Republicans were not going to vote for that version, which included more spending cuts and a slightly different tax mix, Democrats tweaked it to make it more to their own liking.
If they ever come to an actual compromise that includes Rauner and Madigan, I would expect they would return to the more Republican-friendly version.
I see government as something that can help others, can invest in the economy and can provide our kids great schools our communities great protection with police and fire. That’s what I believe about government.
You see a guy like JB Pritzker, they catch him on tape, and he’s talking about maybe swapping money for an appointment with Gov. Blagojevich. And he’s using insider language. He’s using code words like ‘I hear ya, I hear ya.’
I mean, anybody who’s ever watched ‘Goodfellas’ or one of those mob movies knows that they’re not gonna come out and say ‘If you give me this and I’ll give you that,’ they use code language. And that’s part of it.
“Which, incidentally, if you can do for me what you did for [Lisa Madigan], before the end of the year. Can you think about that?” Blagojevich asked, aware that Pritzker had donated $50,000 to Madigan during the previous year.
“I can’t, I mean, not while everything’s up in the air, but I hear ya,” Pritzker said. “I hear ya and, and, and … But anyway …”
But that’s not the sick thing of all of that. The sick thing is when he laughs at his sister’s failure. When his sisters’ bank, Blagojevich makes fun of his sister’s bank going down and he laughs about that.
Look, I have eleven brothers and sisters, my wife is one of five. She has 31 cousins, I have more than 50. We see everything through that lens. We see ourselves as a family, a big American family and we’re going to treat everybody as though they’re part of our family, too. And when you’re part of somebody’s family you don’t laugh at their failure.
And then to double down and make it worse. Not only is he laughing at his sister, he’s laughing at the fact that that bank failed because they made subprime loans to poor people in places like Chicago, to buy houses they couldn’t afford, that they ended up losing, that mark our city today, years later, destroying not only that house that’s now vacant and abandoned, but the entire block, so that people move away, and then they close the local school and now the entire neighborhood’s circling the drain, and he and Blagojevich think that that’s funny. And no one who thinks that that’s stuff’s funny deserves to be the governor of the state of Illinois.
I think there’s something inherently unpredictable about billionaires, frankly. I think that when you don’t have customers, when you don’t have clients, when you’ve never worked for someone else, when you’ve never had to report, you become careless. And you might become careless in the sense that you pass bad checks so often you finally get arrested for it. But you can hire a lawyer to clean up that mess.
You can laugh at other peoples’ failures because it doesn’t impact you. Who thought anything was funny about the 2007, 8, 9 period in America? Who laughed during that period about anything? And now they’re laughing at that, they’re laughing at us. And that’s completely sick behavior.
You can find an explanation for the Pritzker “pass bad checks so often you finally get arrested for it” reference by clicking here.
I’m a person of means, but I’m not a mean person. Our parents taught us to be part of a family, to treat each other well, and to look after each other. And that’s what we need in our party more than anything else.
You know, with some wisdom, the primary was set in March, months and months and months before the November general election. That allows our party… time to heal the wounds, to come together, to create a unified message that we can all agree on and then go to battle with the other party… So, I think there’s plenty of time next year to heal the wounds. […]
It’s totally possible to have an enormous fight with your own family and then come together as one against everybody else, and that’s what we should do.
Pritzker responded with a statement that condemned Kennedy for attacking his family, saying he “expected my opponents to throw everything at me during the course of this campaign.”
But, Pritzker said, “I certainly didn’t expect Chris Kennedy, who knows more than anyone what it’s like to grow up with your family in the public limelight, to attack me and my family. I’m running for governor on my life’s work in business and the community, not my family’s, and I hope that Chris would begin to do the same.”
Um, I didn’t see any attack by Kennedy on Pritzker’s family. All I saw was Pritzker’s attack on his sister’s bank.
The below link is to a music video featuring Assistant Secretary of the Senate Scott Kaiser. The band, Nick Bafino and the Innocents, opened for Boston at the PCCC and is playing this Friday at the Legacy of Giving music festival in Springfield. I somehow happened upon this and was surprised the video had not been more widely circulated.
Scott isn’t in the band, but he was in the video, which, by the way, was not filmed during state time. They did it on a Saturday. How he’s managed to keep this a secret for so long is beyond me.
* Anyway, it’s not really the sort of music I usually feature here, but we all love Scott Kaiser, so here you go…
WBEZ: So, speaking of social services, I want to talk a little bit about the Department of Children and Family Services, DCFS. Two and a half years ago, you brought in George Sheldon, who we had on this show. I believe you called him an all-star. He resigned this week amid controversy, some having to do with contracts benefitting associates, was he the wrong guy for this job?
GOVERNOR BRUCE RAUNER: Well, first of all, let me say we need to provide the proper support for our most vulnerable children. We have so many children growing up in abject poverty, it breaks my heart. And many of them come from broken families with abusive adults in the household. Very important that we do everything we can to support our vulnerable children. It’s very difficult work, very challenging and unfortunately our Department of Children and Family Services has been a failing bureaucracy with unmanageable work rules and contracts and restrictions in terms of law of what they can and can’t do that ties their hands, it’s a very broken system. George came in, he was a star in the Obama administration, he’s a Democrat, he was a star in the Florida government. I believe he did everything he could, he was heavily recruited, I did not ask him to leave or force him out, he accepted another position. He was extremely frustrated trying to make changes. There are investigations ongoing right now, I support those. We are trying to understand exactly what’s been happening down at the levels of the department of children and family services, we need to make all the improvements we can, we need to help our most vulnerable kids.
WBEZ: What about the reports that DCFS was giving gift cards to employees to close out cases, are you investigating what’s wrong with that?
RAUNER: We are investigating everything. Everything at every level.
WBEZ: So again, was he the wrong guy for the job?
RAUNER: Well, we’ve got to fix the system. George was here for two years, and he tried to fix it. And we just we can never give up. We’ve got to bring talented people in who are going to improve our systems to help our most vulnerable kids. It’s the most important work we can do.
That transcript was provided by the Democratic Governors Association.
* From the DGA…
On his appointment in 2015, Governor Bruce Rauner said George Sheldon was the “best of the best.” A year later, Rauner repeatedly praised Sheldon’s work for leading an “impressive transformation” at the agency.
But Sheldon’s record tells a different story. Sheldon’s agency came under investigation for crony hires and handing out contracts to friends, and most recently it was discovered that DCFS “awarded” $100 gift cards to DCFS investigators that “closed the most cases in a month.” In the case of Semaj Crosby, DCFS personnel had contact with her family 16 times last year but the state still allowed Crosby to remain in the home.
“Bruce Rauner needs to come clean on why the Department of Children and Family Services was mismanaged on his watch,” said DGA Illinois Communications Director Sam Salustro. “But today, Governor Rauner chose to bury his head in the sand and defend his hand-picked appointee, George Sheldon. Bruce Rauner has to own his administration’s failures, and explain why he did not act to remove George Sheldon or intervene in the department.”
Governor Bruce Rauner today vetoed Senate Bill 19 due to an agreement between the Department of Corrections and the Illinois Nurses Association. As a result of good faith negotiations, both sides reached an agreement on an alternative to subcontracting that was fair to taxpayers and state employees.
Governor Rauner wrote in his veto message:
“Since the passage of Senate Bill 19 by the General Assembly, our Administration has negotiated a new contract with the Illinois Nurses Association and addressed these concerns. The agreement allows the Department to achieve the necessary fiscal and operational objectives without resorting to contracting with outside vendors. The agreement represents what is possible when all parties work together.”
The governor was getting a lot of heat from Republican legislators to settle this matter with the prison nurse.
Senator Andy Manar, a Bunker Hill Democrat and supporter of collective bargaining rights, reacted this afternoon to word that Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed a measure that would have protected the jobs of unionized state prison nurses:
“Gov. Rauner went back to the table to with these nurses and renegotiated their contract because of pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Had it not been for that, he would have embraced this as yet another opportunity to thumb his nose at unions and working families,” Manar said.
“Since it was so easy for him to return to the table and reopen negotiations with the prison nurses, perhaps he can find it within himself to return to the table with AFSCME and do the same. As Gov. Rauner acknowledged in his veto message, an agreement is indeed possible when all parties work together.”
Illinois’ credit rating has fallen so low that the state is too risky an investment for even itself, Comptroller Susana Mendoza and Treasurer Michael Frerichs announced Friday.
Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s both lowered the state’s credit rating to one level above junk-bond status Thursday after the Governor and the legislature failed to reach agreement on a budget before the scheduled end of the session. This is the lowest Illinois’ bonds have been rated in the state’s 44-year history of bond ratings. The Fiscal Year ends June 30 and the agencies warn more downgrades could happen then if the impasse continues.
That means higher costs to taxpayers; more difficulty raising funds for Illinois’ most basic needs; and further cuts in services for the state’s educational institutions and its most vulnerable residents. Rating agencies and business groups are urging Governor Rauner to stop holding the budget hostage to his pet projects and negotiate a balanced budget in good faith with legislative leaders.
That point when the treasurer was supposed to stop buying Illinois bonds was actually reached a year ago in June of 2016 when S&P dropped Illinois’ rating to BBB-plus.
Gov. Bruce Rauner bears his share of the blame for this ridiculous impasse. He’s held up the budget process by demanding reforms that are only tangentially related to the business of determining how much our government costs and finding ways to pay for it. And the proposed fiscal 2018 budget he offered earlier this year was at least $4.6 billion out of whack, according to the Civic Federation’s math. When the time comes to ask whether Illinois is better off under four years of Rauner’s leadership, we know what the answer will be.
But let’s not mince words: The one person who could have passed a spending bill by May 31 and sent it to the governor’s desk is Madigan. The Democratic-controlled Senate, with President John Cullerton, did its job, passing a plan that included tax hikes that, while unpalatable, are a key part of the tough medicine that all sides—including the governor—acknowledge is necessary to bring Illinois back into fiscal health. And yet, the Democratic-controlled House, which Madigan runs like a Middle Eastern strongman, let the budget deadline come and go without doing anything.
Why? It’s simple: Madigan put his own interests before the interests of the state. A vote for a bill that would hike taxes could endanger some members of his delegation in the next election, especially downstate. And if enough of those House seats flip from blue to red, Madigan loses his spot as speaker of the House. The whole state suffers, in other words, so Madigan can keep his job.
This is the reality every Illinoisan must live with until Madigan is voted out of power. With our unpaid bills approaching $16 billion, a general funds deficit beyond $10 billion, borrowing costs skyrocketing as ratings agencies downgrade us to banana-republic levels, and unfunded pension obligations north of $130 billion, Madigan’s one-man job-security plan is too damned expensive.
I put Rauner first because, much as he wants to rail about how Illinois took a wrong turn under GOP predecessors Jim Thompson, Jim Edgar and George Ryan, Rauner has underperformed all of them.
Sure, Illinois needs structural reform. Chris Kennedy was right the other day in his theory about the tyranny of the property tax lawyers. But Rauner came in with an agenda as long as your leg: anti-union measures, tort reform, term limits, merit selection of judges, a property tax freeze, workers’ compensation changes, etc. In the last few weeks, he’s finally whittled that down to a manageable few. But the pattern of overreaching was set.
Rauner compounded that by highly personalizing his fight with Senate President John Cullerton and especially Madigan, throwing around terms like “corrupt.” That’s no way to get to a deal. Nor is running robocalls targeting Democratic lawmakers in the very days leading up to the May 31 budget deadline.
When Senate GOP leader Christine Radogno finally had enough earlier this year and tried to craft her own budget deal with Cullerton, she got sandbagged. Rauner pulled votes off their “grand bargain,” rather than trying to force Madigan’s hand and split the House Democratic caucus. The result: a potential “negative credit spiral,” as Standard & Poor’s put it yesterday, when it downgraded the state’s credit rating, again. Or as Civic Federation President Laurence Msall says, “As the chief executive, the governor has the prime responsibility for running the state.”
* Crain’s Chicago Business has again posted my column online early. Here’s an excerpt…
The impasse is the most intentionally vicious act ever committed by this state government on its own people. Period.
It is far worse than the damage done by decades of mismanagement that piled up gigantic pension debts because that wasn’t purposely malicious. It was just plain God-awful stupid, ignorant and short-sighted.
* A recent NY Magazine feature on Uber discusses the company’s ambition to become a monopoly, which the author concludes is unlikely…
To explain its massive losses, Uber and its investors have often cited Amazon, which didn’t turn a year-end profit for ten years as it built out an infrastructure that made the selling of more and more books — and eventually, of everything — cheaper and more efficient the larger it got. But Amazon’s biggest-ever loss was $1.4 billion, half of Uber’s 2016 deficit, and Jeff Bezos responded by cutting 15 percent of his workforce. Plus, Uber’s economics barely resemble Amazon’s. The taxi business doesn’t scale in the same way, and while Uber’s technology is sophisticated, the barriers to entry are relatively low, and Uber has had to fend off various competitors. So far as Horan could tell, there was only one possible path for Uber to meet that $68 billion valuation: eliminate competition.
Uber’s potential aspirations toward monopoly are a sensitive matter — in discussing how Uber Pool became more efficient the more people used it, McClendon referred to Uber’s ideal state as a “monopoly,” before correcting himself to call it “not a monopoly, but a heavily used service” — and while every company dreams of owning its entire market, the question of whether Uber can do so has become murky.
* Duncan Black, an economist by training and a frequent Uber critic from the left, sums it up this way…
Uber’s fortunes depend on it being a monopoly (multiple local monopolies), which it has no realistic path to achieving.
Which brings me back to my original point, made years ago, that whatever the problem with local cab regulation, there is a reason the market depends on rate regulation and supply restriction.
Chicago cabdrivers struggling to survive in the Uber era are fighting a losing battle, with 40 percent of all medallions “inactive” and hundreds more either in foreclosure or headed there, a new study shows.
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2500 represents hundreds of cabdrivers and is continuing to organize the others.
To bolster its case, the union asked statistician James Bradach of Nonprofit Data and Applications to analyze countless pieces of information disjointedly made available in on the city’s data portal.
His report, “Run Off the Road: Chicago’s Taxi Medallion Foreclosure Crisis,” shows a surge in medallion foreclosures and a precipitous drop in both taxicab trips and driver income in the three years since City Hall created an unlevel regulatory playing field between taxis and ride-hailing.
The study’s findings include:
227,033 ride-hailing vehicles registered with the city as of April competing with 6,999 taxi medallions.
The number of “monthly taxi trips” on the streets of Chicago has dropped by 52 percent over the last three years — from 2.3 million to 1.1 million.
774 medallions have been “surrendered to the city at some point,” with 579 more receiving foreclosure notices and 107 lawsuits filed since October.
2,940 taxis or 42 percent of the city’s 6,999 taxi medallions were classified as “inactive” in March after having failed to pick up a single passenger in the previous month. That means those licenses face “imminent foreclosure in the coming months,” the study says. In March, 2014, 16 percent of medallions were inactive.
Average monthly gross income for every one of the city’s active taxicab medallions has fallen over the last three years — from $5,276 to $3,206.
Cabdrivers who were eking out a $19,000 annual living after expenses in 2013 are now operating $4,000 in the red. That’s because their $44,000 in annual expenses have remained the same while business has plummeted.
A former state senator from Elgin is suing for back pay, alleging the General Assembly violated the Illinois Constitution by forcing furloughs and eliminating cost-of-living adjustments for legislators.
Michael Noland, a Democrat who retired in January after losing a race for Congress, says in the lawsuit that the state constitution prohibits such mid-term salary adjustments.
The complaint, filed yesterday in Cook County, didn’t specify how much Noland lost as a result of eight bills passed between 2009 and 2016 that eliminated COLAs and five bills during the same period that mandated 36 furlough days.
Noland could not be immediately reached for comment. Michael Scotti, a private-practice attorney in Chicago representing Noland and a special assistant attorney general for the state, declined to comment. He said Noland would issue a statement later today.
I think he’s right on the constitutional issue, but I hope for his sake that he never plans on running for office ever again. But if he prevails, it sure wouldn’t hurt a lobbying career. I’m not at all saying he’s planning such a thing, mind you (he never registered with the state), I’m just sayin…
Noland in 2012 voted in favor of at least one of the bills to cut out pay raises. That measure passed the Senate without opposition, and Noland was quoted as supporting the legislation in a statement posed on the Illinois Senate Democrats website.
“We need structural tax reform to properly fund our most important priorities — like education, health care and the ongoing need for infrastructure,” Noland said at the time. “Until we do this, the least we can do is cut our own pay again. I know most working families in Illinois are not seeing raises this year, so we shouldn’t either.”
TONY SARABIA: OK, before I let you go, just a last question. And we hear a lot of this from listeners often when we have you on the show, that they’re hearing the same points and answers and I’m wondering what have you said today that was different than you have said in the past?
GOV. BRUCE RAUNER: Well Tony, when we’re on a path, a good path to change the system, there’s no reason for different answers.
You know, I have people come up to me every day, Democrats and Republicans who identify themselves as such, Democrats come to me and say ‘Governor, stay strong, you’re on the right track.’
I had an elderly woman come up to me recently, she grabbed me by the arm and she had a little, kind of teary eyed, and she looked at me and she said, ‘Please, governor, you’re our last hope. Don’t give up. Stay the course. We’ve got to change our system.’
* The Chicago Tribune gave Gov. Bruce Rauner’s campaign a gift today with this front page headline…
You can probably bet that headline will make an appearance in a Rauner TV ad if this impasse is never resolved. “He’s fightin’ those tax-hikin’ Democrats with everything he has!” or something.
As the final hours of the spring session ticked down, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner railed against Democrats for failing to send him a budget and for letting the state government stalemate spill into its 24th month.
The public scolding came after Rauner had spent time working to ensure that a Democrat-led attempt to pass a spending plan with multiple tax increases never made it to his desk. […]
That the governor made a point of getting out in front of the Democrats’ budget efforts illustrates the tricky politics at play in the stalemate. While Rauner’s reelection strategy hinges on branding Democrats as tax-happy, he might have had difficulty explaining to voters why he vetoed a budget that would raise taxes but also would have ended an impasse that’s diminished the state’s financial standing, decimated social services and starved universities. […]
Getting to that point in negotiations with Democrats has proved elusive, however. The governor already has put $50 million of his own money into his re-election bid and given millions more to the Illinois Republican Party, which has been plastering Democratic districts with attack ads.
Asked about those ads, which ran during the make-or-break final month of the session, Rauner said, “I don’t know, I mean, whatever. I spend no time thinking about the politics. That’s separate and I don’t spend time on it.”
…Adding… Wordslinger in comments…
Who’s making those spots and writing those checks? His stuntman?
I tell you what, when the Republicans in the House realize they’re going down with the ship, they should stand up, work with the speaker, work with us and the Republicans over in the Senate… Some of the worst criticisms of the governor I’ve heard have come from the Republicans.
That would require the House Speaker to actually want a deal. So far, it doesn’t look that way to me.
Cullerton says the key is Republicans in the House.
“You know what, if there’s enough people to stand up on their hind legs over there and say, you know what governor, you’re mismanaging the government, we’re having disastrous results here, we need to do a deal with the Democrats and we’ll get the compromises you had originally agreed to. We’ll pass your original budget with your original tax rate and then it doesn’t make any difference what the governor says because they could override him and we could override him,” Cullerton said.
The Illinois General Assembly voted to increase a fee on cell phone bills in order to fund 911 services. It was a rare example of Republican lawmakers defying the Rauner administration.
Negotiators involved in the legislation say the governor tried to pull Republican support because Rauner did not want Mayor Rahm Emanuel to get a win.
But GOP lawmakers ended up voting for the measure, which includes a cell phone fee increase in Chicago.
State Rep. Chad Hays, R-Catlin, says the attempt to fortify 911 service centers was going to fail because of “peripheral” reasons.
“And I suggested that I was not going to go home and tell the people in my community that when they dial 911, on the other end of the line it says, ‘Sorry this line has been disconnected,’ because the governor and the mayor of Chicago are in a wrestling match about something peripheral,” Hays said.
The governor simply did not want to give any more money to Chicago until the impasse was resolved and he had a hard brick on the legislation. But Republicans in both chambers ended up voting for the bill. 34 House Republicans voted for it and all but 3 Senators voted for the bill and Senate GOP Leader Radogno even added herself as a hyphenated co-sponsor on Wednesday.
* The lesson here is the governor can be beaten if the House Democrats decide to work with the House Republicans and come up with a real plan that individual Republicans can feel comfortable supporting.
180,000: Number of unpaid [state] bills in Illinois as of Wednesday.
$14.5 billion: Dollar damage of those unpaid bills. The backlog has tripled since 2015 and, at this pace, will reach $28 billion by 2021. At that time, it will consume 80 percent of the state’s budget.
7 months: Average wait for a bill to be paid by the state. Illinois is now paying bills for October 2016.
9 to 12 percent: The high interest rate Illinois must pay, by law, on overdue bills.
$800 million: Interest due on the state’s unpaid bills.
6: Number of credit rating downgrades Illinois has incurred since the budgeting impasse began. Illinois now has the worst credit rating of any state in the country. Illinois is in danger of plunging into junk bond status. [It’s now 8.]
$952 million: Money Illinois has promised but failed to pay to human service agencies over the last two years, short-changing care for the disabled, the poor and the elderly.
69: Percentage of social service agencies that have received no or only partial payment from the state in fiscal year 2017. This compares to 35 percent last fiscal year.
46: Percentage of agencies that have cut back on the number of clients they serve.
25: Percentage of agencies that have eliminated entire programs, such as for training for the unemployed and assistance to the elderly.
19: Percentage of agencies that have laid off staff because of delays and cuts in state funding.
57,000 cops: Their police training classes, across the state, were canceled.
$4. 6 billion: Amount the state is behind in paying health insurance claims for employees and retirees. Doctors and dentists, who say the delayed payments threaten to put them out of business, are demanding that patients pay upfront.
80 percent: Reduced funding, based on 2015 levels, that public universities have received under the last stop-gap state budget.
6: In April, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the creditworthiness of six state universities — The University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, Northeastern Illinois University, Eastern Illinois University, Southern Illinois University, Western Illinois University and Governor’s State University.
180 employees: Number Northeastern University announced it will lay off this summer because of a $10.8 million shortfall in state funding.
40 percent: Proportion of employees laid off at Chicago State University in 2016, to a significant degree because of reduced and inconsistent state funding.
16,461 students: They all left Illinois to go to college someplace else in 2015, while only 2,117 out-of-state students came to Illinois. University administrators say the exodus continues and can be blamed in part on university funding uncertainties, and the accompanying hit to the reputation of the state’s universities.
1,000 students: They failed to return to college for a second semester last year because grant funding for low-income students was frozen. Another 124,000 students stiffed by the state on their Monetary Assistance Program grants managed to remain in school only because the university or college fronted them the money, hoping the state would be good for it eventually.
4.7 percent: That’s the unemployment rate in Illinois, higher than in all its Midwestern neighbors except Kentucky. Business leaders have stressed to the Sun-Times Editorial Board repeatedly that while they’d love to see lower taxes and a loosening of regulations, what they require above all is governmental and taxation stability and predictability.
6: Number of Illinois small business development centers that closed for lack of funding in the last two years. Seven remain.
$850 million: This is what Illinois owes public schools across the state for “categorical” programs such as special education, transportation, bilingual services and early childhood education. The state did not make its September 2016 quarterly payment until April of this year. When will the December and March payments be made? Nobody knows.
$454.8 million: That’s what the state owes Chicago area’s Regional Transportation Authority, forcing the RTA to borrow to keep trains and buses running. The cost of this short-term borrowing is $950,919. Remember that when fares go up.
37,508 people: They all moved out of Illinois in 2016, the most residents lost by any state. It was Illinois’ third straight year of population decline. Leading the decline — for the third year in a row — was the City of Chicago, which lost 8,638 residents from 2015 to 2016. Of the 10 largest cities in the country, Chicago was the only one to see a drop in population.
To your post about the Pritzker ad. JB’s slogan at the end is “Fighting for what’s right, getting things done.” That’s eerily similar to Rod Blagojevich’s 2006 slogan, “Getting things done for people.”
Deerfield attorney Bob Morgan announced Thursday that he’s running as a Democrat for the Illinois House seat now held by State Rep. Scott Drury (D-Highwood). […]
“It’s been more than 700 days without a budget and it’s time for someone to stand up for the values of our community, make changes and begin fixing the problem,” said Morgan, a health care policy attorney.
Drury has claimed that he’s exploring a run for governor. He wouldn’t say whether he’d yet made up his mind.
“In a recent conversation with Bob Morgan, I was very disappointed to learn that he is open to voting for Mike Madigan to be the speaker of the House,” Drury said. “The last thing the 58th District needs is to go backwards.”
Morgan said he made no mention of Madigan during their brief conversation.
“I told him I would support a Democrat for speaker who shared my progressive values,” Morgan said.
A good Democrat bill got introduced in the Senate and a good Republican bill got introduced in the Senate. I support either of those bills. They were good bills.
The governor went on to call the House’s version, which ended up passing, a Chicago bailout.
* But let’s go back to when Democratic Sen. Andy Manar passed his own version out of the Senate…
The Rauner Administration released the following statement regarding the Senate’s passage of SB1. The following is attributable to Illinois Secretary of Education Beth Purvis
“This bill is not consistent with the framework of the bipartisan, bicameral School Funding Commission. Senator Manar abandoned our bipartisan process, departing from agreements already finalized in the commission and forcing a Chicago bailout at the expense of every other school district in the state, some of which are in worse financial straits than CPS.”
* Rauner also told WTTW yesterday that he could support Manar’s bill “with very minor tweaks.” But Purvis’s May 17th statement belies that comment.
He’s rewriting history and he’s getting away with it.
*** UPDATE *** From the governor’s office…
The governor was referring to Andy Manar’s SB 1, Senate Amendment 3 which he believes can be the basis to a compromise. The governor believes that there is a good place for compromise between Sen. Barickman’s SB 1124 and Sen. Manar’s SB1, Senate Amendment 3. The governor also believes that the conversations that were occurring between House Republicans and Will Davis just hours prior to floor Amendment 1 being filed could lead to a school funding formula with reforms that everyone could celebrate.
Just one day after Illinois lawmakers left Springfield without approving a budget, Rauner’s spirits are still up. But Illinois debt ratings are down – again.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more ratings downgrades, there should be, because the majority in the General assembly won’t get a balanced budget and they won’t get changes to keep it balanced,” the Republican governor says.
*** UPDATE *** Pritzker campaign response…
To be clear, further downgrades will lower the Illinois bond rating to junk status. This will do irrevocable harm to the state, which Rauner’s ‘wait and see’ approach is unlikely to fix.
This flippant response came in an interview with CBS Chicago, one of the many interviews Rauner sat for yesterday as part of his ‘I failed to pass a budget again’ media tour. The station noted that Rauner’s “spirits are still up” 702 days into a devastating crisis in the state he is supposed to lead.
“Illinoisans aren’t surprised that Bruce Rauner failed to pass a budget. They aren’t surprised he can’t figure out how to lead this state. And they aren’t surprised he can’t be bothered to do the job he was elected to do,” said Pritzker campaign spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh. “After 700 days of Bruce Rauner driving this state into the ground, this is sadly what Illinois families have come to expect. Bruce Rauner is a failed governor and he shouldn’t be surprised when he is voted out of office next November.”
