* Again with this?…

…Adding… March of 2014…

“I apologize but we may have to go through a little rough times and we have to do what Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers,” Rauner said referencing Reagan’s decision in 1981 to fire 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.

“We sort of have to do a do-over and shut things down for a little while, that’s what we’re going to do,” Rauner said. […]

“It’s going to be rough. It’s going to be hardball but I’m used to that. I’ve transformed a lot of business organizations in my life and I can bring that same discipline in Springfield,” he said.

* April of 2015…

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner kicked off a campaign-style statewide tour Monday by indicating he’ll try to “leverage” the state’s money woes into securing a series of pro-business changes from a General Assembly controlled by Democrats likely to fiercely oppose them.

The first stop was at Tribune Tower, where the governor sought to frame up the last seven scheduled weeks of the spring session during an appearance before the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board. The governor and legislative leaders will try to craft a new budget before the May 31 adjournment deadline against the backdrop of a projected deficit of $6 billion and Rauner calling for major cuts.

“Crisis creates opportunity. Crisis creates leverage to change … and we’ve got to use that leverage of the crisis to force structural change,” said Rauner, borrowing from a political philosophy famously coined by his friend Rahm Emanuel that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

…Adding… June of 2015…

Gov. Bruce Rauner says a partial state government shutdown is worth the pain if it brings fundamental change to business and politics in Illinois.

The Republican told reporters Tuesday morning that “change is hard … but we need to have change.'’

* March of 2017…

“It came down to three things: workers’ comp, parity in (the length of) the income tax and property tax and budget cuts. Cullerton’s position is, ‘This is the deal, take it or leave it,’ and as far as we’re concerned, it’s dead and there’s nothing more for us to do because we’re not going to take a bad deal and neither is the Senate (Republican) caucus,” [the Rauner confidant] said.

Radogno responded that no one in the governor’s office “speaks for the Senate (GOP) caucus.” She said the Senate’s grand bargain plan was “not and never has been a ‘take it or leave it’ from the Senate president and insisted talks on a “final version” were still taking place.

* December of 2017…

Some Republicans joined Democrats in July to end the impasse by passing a major income tax hike and spending plan over Rauner’s vetoes. As a result, the governor said the state had “lost” an opportunity for economic change.

“We had the possibility of a transformation for the state with the crisis that we had — if we had a principled caucus. It’s the primary reason I ran. We had the opportunity for a massive transformation. We lost that,” the Republican governor said.