The Floodgates
Democrats won’t let the budget
stop a deluge of bills.
Ten years in the minority frustrated Illinois Senate Democrats. They would sponsor bills that had passed the House with huge bipartisan majorities–and often significant public support–only to watch them quietly die in the Senate Rules Committee, which was controlled with an iron fist by the Republicans.
There were few Democratic victories. A high point came when Senate minority leader Emil Jones deftly maneuvered Senate president Pate Philip into backing a “continuing budget resolution” for education funding, meaning schools would be taken care of first before the budget was pieced together. Jones rejoiced that he had made education an “entitlement.” In the past, schools usually got the leftover scraps.
But Jones’s entitlement law eventually expired, and it had to be renewed every year. An entitlement isn’t really an entitlement if it always has to be renewed–it can be taken away whenever the budget gets too tight.
But now the Senate Democrats are in the majority, and former minority leader Jones has become Senate president. This year Senate Bill “1” is a Jones proposal to make the school-funding entitlement a permanent fixture of law.
Pate Philip also killed legislation sought by Democrat Jesse White calling for the Secretary of State to appoint an Inspector General, who then would be confirmed by the Senate. The office would have real teeth, including subpoena power. That proposal, S.B. 13, sponsored by new Senate Majority Leader Vince Demuzio, zoomed out of executive committee earlier this month by a vote of 13 to 0.
Philip was no fan of allowing Democratic regions to update their voting machines, even after the Florida presidential debacle. (A couple of years ago, Chicago spent millions to replace a punch-card system with new optical scanners, but the city was prevented from implementing the change because it lacked Senate approval.) Now S.B. 82, sponsored by Democratic senator Larry Walsh, would require the State Board of Elections to establish a grant program to update polling processes.
Philip and the Republicans also staunchly opposed a bill to require the videotaping of police interrogations. S.B. 15, sponsored by Chicago Democratic senator Barach Obama, would mandate that procedure.
The new chairman of the Senate’s labor and commerce committee is Democrat Carol Ronen. She’s behind S.B. 2, which would prohibit employers from basing wages on gender. This bill wouldn’t have stood a chance with the Republicans.
Pate deliberately killed a bill last year that would have reinstated some collective-bargaining rights taken away from Chicago public school teachers by the 1995 school reform law. Senate president Jones has already pushed S.B. 19 (which also prohibits for-profit entities from operating public schools) through the education committee.
The big question is “How many liberal bills will the Senate approve?” The answer could be “lots.” So far the Senate has only taken up the sort of liberal measures that much of the public supports, but there’s a lot of legislation in the pipeline. The year is just beginning.
And the House membership is more liberal than the Senate. Left to their own devices, the two chambers could end up sending a lot of left-leaning legislation to the governor’s desk.
House Speaker Michael Madigan will try to keep a lid on many of the bills, particularly those that could outrage the business lobbies. Madigan was in the House in 1975, the last time the Democrats controlled both legislative chambers and the governor’s office. Back then, the Democrats went overboard and created a backlash that brought in a Republican governor in 1976. Philip killed a lot of good bills when he was Senate president, but he also killed a lot of bad ones. Nobody knows whether the Democrats can control themselves.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2003.
