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Gov. Rod Blagojevich made a last-minute attempt last
week to at least show that he was trying to get the hopelessly stalled
budget negotiations back on track. Blagojevich, who has tried harder to
avoid blame for the current overtime session than to actually negotiate in
good faith, walked into House Speaker Michael Madigan’s office
unannounced last week in what was supposed to be a dramatic gesture of
goodwill and harmony among Democrats. But it was too little, too late. Madigan hasn’t
exactly been negotiating in good faith, either, and he reportedly offered
up no realistic alternatives during the 30-minute confab. Blagojevich had a
smile on his face as he left the speaker’s office, but it was clear
from talking to him that he had run into a brick wall. The governor also
refused to back off from his ambitious, multibillion-dollar
health-insurance plan, which has caused much of the rancor at the
Statehouse.
The simple truth is that very few legislators in the
General Assembly have ever campaigned on providing universal health
insurance, which is usually considered a federal issue. Many, including
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, go so far as to say that universal
insurance ought to be a solely federal issue. Late last week, Daley finally urged Blagojevich to
back off his health-care proposals: “You can’t do [universal
health insurance] city by city, county by county, or state by state. You
wish you could, but you couldn’t. Because say if I have 500
employees. . . . Now they come along and say, ‘I’m gonna charge
you extra to give everybody health care.’ Well, why should I be in
the state of Illinois? I’ll go someplace else.”
Most legislators have been campaigning for
school-funding reform and infrastructure development for the past 20 years
or more. As a result, the public and the politicians are far more familiar
and comfortable with those concepts, and they were ripe for passage this
year. Instead, what the governor did was essentially
attempt to conjure a gigantic, expensive issue from scratch, gin up a
groundswell of support statewide, and ram it through the legislature in
three and a half months, along with billions of dollars for
education-funding reform and infrastructure development. So far, he has
failed on all counts. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen here
— or in any other democracy, for that matter.
The bottom line is, there simply isn’t the will
to increase state revenues enough to do all three things — education,
infrastructure and health insurance — and do them right.
Blagojevich’s disastrous gross-receipts-tax proposal poisoned the
tax-hike well even further by activating the business community as it has
never been before and calling enormous attention to the General Assembly
among an electorate that tends to ignore the body. He ended up spooking
legislators but good. The governor has a right to propose whatever he
wants, but he should have at least laid some groundwork during his campaign
last year for such a massive expansion of government. If he had, he could
have claimed some sort of mandate this spring, even with his showing of
less than 50 percent at the polls. Instead, he soft-pedaled everything during the
campaign by saying that he wanted to build on his relatively minor
health-insurance accomplishments from his first term. It was all
nonthreatening and benign. But his high-dollar “Illinois
Covered” plan has simply been too much of a shock to the political
body. The fact that it was essentially an empty press-release bill that
delegated most details to the administrative rule-making process also
doomed it from the start. Legislators simply didn’t trust the
governor to follow through in a fiscally responsible manner.
Rich Miller publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political
newsletter, and thecapitolfaxblog.com.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2007.
