Every year, at least one big corporation hires top lobbyists, signs up a PR firm, cuts a deal with pliable and influential third parties, and descends on Springfield with a clever proposal in hand.
And every year, the big corporation wins. The media scream, reformers lament the influence of money on government, and nothing changes.
So it’s no wonder that Exelon thought it could walk away with whatever it wanted during last month’s fall veto session. Consider, for a moment, the sheer gall of its original proposal. The utility’s Chicago-area consumers would have had to pay an additional $2 billion every year so that Exelon’s subsidiary, ComEd, could avoid laying off 400 downstate employees when it purchased Illinois Power’s assets. That’s a whopping $5 million per saved job per year, and yet the proposal attracted immediate bipartisan support.
House Speaker Michael Madigan denounced Exelon’s final proposal as both a lie and a backdoor rate increase, yet it received 39 votes in the Illinois Senate.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich supported the bill, according to Senate President Emil Jones. If Madigan hadn’t refused to allow a vote, it would almost certainly have passed the House, where it had lots of support, and been signed into law.
We are left with a strange result where one of the truly big players lost badly, but nothing appears to have changed.
And then there’s Blagojevich.
After the public hammering he received this spring for how he handled the SBC bill, his top priority in the Exelon deal was positioning himself as a reformer. But Exelon is a very important political player: The governor couldn’t just shaft the company. Just before the final week of the veto session, his aides began negotiating with Exelon. The company dropped its proposal for an explicit rate hike and pledged to not lay off more than 25 IP employees.
The next day, Blagojevich held a press conference. He didn’t announce the agreement. Instead, he declared he would veto any proposal that included a rate hike and cost more than 25 jobs. Exelon quickly issued a statement agreeing to the governor’s terms, and some media outlets went gaga over the governor’s impressive use of the bully pulpit. His staff then began defending the deal against criticism that Exelon was planning to use the bill to raise rates. That lasted one day, until Madigan alleged the utility was lying.
The speaker’s statements didn’t hurt Blagojevich because, as far as the media were concerned, the governor’s only involvement was his thunderous press conference. The governor responded to Madigan’s assertions by saying he’d support any pro-consumer changes Madigan could negotiate, then tiptoed away.
But then Emil Jones figured he might be able to use the Exelon bill to break a last-minute logjam involving a Chicago pension bill. Blagojevich, always sensitive to the wishes of Chicago’s mayor, told Jones to inform the Senate that he supported the Exelon bill.
Even so, the governor was able to avoid being tagged, yet again, as a utility lackey. After Exelon and IP announced the deal was dead, the guv fired off a blistering press release. “Trying to force the government to raise electricity rates by threatening the jobs of honest, hardworking men and women is worse than cynical, it’s repugnant,” the governor stated.
The governor’s statement seems to indicate that the bill his own office negotiated
was a rate hike. But as nobody had fully reported his role, he came out of this
smelling like a rose. And that’s exactly what he wanted all along.
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2003.
