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The toxic combination of an overabundance of
testosterone and fragile male egos seems to be contaminating everything it
touches during the Illinois General Assembly’s overtime session. More issues were added last week to the large pile of
bills being held hostage to the never-ending feud between House Speaker
Michael Madigan on one side and Senate President Emil Jones and Gov. Rod
Blagojevich on the other. The legislation designed to ease AT&T’s
entrance into the cable-TV marketplace has reportedly stalled in the
Senate. The bill passed the House unanimously and has strong bipartisan
support in the Senate, but it has apparently hit an ego snag. The trouble may have started with a laudatory
editorial in the Chicago Tribune that praised the “active and the unflagging
commitment of the bill’s House sponsor, Rep. James Brosnahan, D-Oak
Lawn, and Attorney General Lisa Madigan,” and noted that Madigan also
provided “important support.”
The editorial looked very much like an AT&T plant
to a whole bunch of Statehouse types, including the people who run the
Senate. It probably didn’t help matters when the Sun-Times then ran essentially
the same editorial, praising the same set of characters. State Sen. James
Clayborne, D-Belleville, was also involved in the negotiations at
Jones’ behest, yet he has not received any public recognition, and,
like her father, the House speaker, Lisa Madigan isn’t exactly on
Jones’ A-list these days. Jones has twice criticized the attorney general on
the Senate floor this year. The first time, during the debate over adding
ComEd to an Ameren rate-freeze bill, Jones mocked Lisa Madigan for filing
case after case against his close pals at the giant utility and losing
every one. The other day, after Madigan was mentioned during
debate as a supporter of a particular bill, Jones cracked that his fellow
Democrat, who was once a member of his own caucus, was free to run for the
Senate if she wanted to be a member of the General Assembly again.
“There may be an open seat for her on that side of the aisle,”
Jones said, pointing to the Republicans. It’s also pretty well known that the governor
detests the attorney general, believing, among other things, that she has
strategically leaked what appears to be damning evidence from her various
investigations of his administration. The governor’s feelings about
her may be fueling at least some of Jones’ comments. Jones has
parroted just about every one of the governor’s lines and followed
him down every blind alley this year, from the notorious gross-receipts tax
to a monster-sized health-insurance proposal that many of Jones’ own
members aren’t supporting to the governor’s refusal to even
consider an income-tax hike, an idea that Jones avidly supported until just
a few months ago. According to sources, Jones is resisting a provision
in AT&T’s cable bill that gives the attorney general more
oversight powers. Hardly surprising. Just to show you how weird things have gotten, do you
remember the bill that moves the spring primary up to February from March?
It was ostensibly designed to help Barack Obama’s presidential
campaign by putting Illinois in play during primary season. Well, as of
last week that bill hadn’t been sent to the governor’s desk. The legislation received overwhelming votes in both
chambers and cleared its final legislative hurdle weeks ago, but one or
both of the two leaders haven’t certified it as official. Without
both of those signatures, the governor can’t take any action. The primary bill is not alone. At the time of this
writing, more than 600 bills have passed both chambers, yet just 12 have
actually been sent to the governor’s desk.
Then, of course, there’s the budget bill that
was passed by the House last month but is still in the House because one of
Michael Madigan’s
members placed a parliamentary hold on the legislation. Jones’ people
believe that Madigan did it deliberately to stop the Senate from passing
the bill and avoid any potential government shutdown when the fiscal year
ends. Madigan claims that his downstate members placed the hold on the bill
to prevent any budget action until some sort of agreement could be reached
on the electric-rate issue.
Such is life at the Statehouse these days.
Rich Miller publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political
newsletter, and thecapitolfaxblog.com
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2007.
