Illinois Senate President Emil Jones has never been
fully appreciated as a legislative leader. Jones, who announced his
retirement last week after years at the helm, has a manner of speaking
which leads far too many people to assume that he is not intelligent.
Nothing could be further from the truth. He has been a supremely crafty
tactician, who, despite all the bad raps and his recent blunders, has won
far more than his share of legislative battles. He is literally a larger
than-life-character.
Yet, there’s little doubt that Jones has been
the most publicly vilified legislative leader in memory, particularly in
the past two years.
His constant and unwavering support for Rod
Blagojevich, the most unpopular (and most investigated) governor in the
nation, certainly contributed to the shwacking. Jones stood by the
governor’s hugely controversial Gross Receipts Tax idea last year
when everyone else had abandoned it and when it had become clear that the
proposal had probably killed off his professed life’s dream of
enacting permanent, real education funding reform.
Jones appeared to brazenly block electric utility
rate relief at the behest of his buddies at ComEd. He stood by the governor
throughout a long, bitter overtime session last year and this year. His
family benefited from pay raises and no-bid contracts from the Blagojevich
administration. He allegedly lied to House Speaker Michael Madigan about
upholding last year’s budget agreement when he refused to override
Blagojevich’s vetoes that targeted House Democrats and Senate
Republicans for political punishment.
Jones blocked a constitutional amendment for recall
of public officials and deliberately slow-walked an ethics reform bill at
the governor’s behest. He railed against attempts to block a pay
raise for lawmakers, infamously telling reporters that he needed that raise
and some food stamps. And he just now managed to replace himself on the
November ballot with his son.
Sen. Jones has become a liability for his members.
You can’t get thumped for all of those outrages on an almost daily
basis without at least some mud splashing on your rank and file. So his
announcement last week that he would give up the Senate presidency may help
ease the pain of some of his incumbents.
The retirement’s legislative impact is not
completely clear. It’s thought that Speaker Madigan and maybe even
some of Jones’ own members will want to put off a multibillion-dollar
capital construction plan until Jones leaves office. Why cut a deal
now when a better one might be concocted after January?
Meanwhile, loads of candidates are engaged in the
Jones succession battle. It’s every man (literally, because there are
no women in the race as I write this) for himself. And it’s far too
early to make any predictions of how things will play out. There are no
locks, there are no true frontrunners. This thing is wide open.
Also, word is that some candidates are already
beginning to reach out to Senate Republicans in an effort to pad their
margins and reach the magic number of 30 required to win the presidency – a
majority of those elected in the entire Senate, not just among Democrats.
But forget about those 30 votes today. The big
problem now is just finding 19 votes, a majority of the Democratic caucus.
Almost that many Democrats are currently floating their names for
president.
There is certainly no shortage of egos in the General
Assembly, and the Senate Democrats have an overabundance. It will likely
take some time before many are ready to set aside their vanity candidacies
and start actively engaging in the process.
Rich Miller publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter,
and thecapitolfaxblog.com.
This article appears in Aug 21-27, 2008.
