Politics – Rich Miller

After years of ugly gridlock and weeks of groups and political leaders whipping up an already disgusted populace over a 1.2 percentage point income tax increase, lots of legislators were understandably on edge last week. Rep. Will Guzzardi (D-Chicago) tweeted ahead of the votes to override Gov. Bruce Rauner’s vetoes of a budget package that […]

Senate Republican Leader Christine Radogno was the first-ever female leader of a state legislative caucus in Illinois. That alone puts her in the history books. But she’s also a decent human being, something that often seems in short supply around the Statehouse. The fact that several Senate Democrats showed up for her press conference last […]

Gov. Bruce Rauner regularly attempts to “go over the heads” of the news media and talk directly to the public without any journalistic filters. Usually for people in his particular position, that’s just not possible. Governors aren’t presidents, after all. They can’t deliver “Oval Office” addresses that are carried live by television networks or give […]

One of the hottest rumors making the rounds among Statehouse types last week was that the governor and/or the Illinois Republican Party will be sending “trackers” to Springfield for the upcoming special legislative session. The rumor, which was everywhere, was that the trackers would follow Democrats around to try and get them to say silly […]

As we’ve all seen over the past several months, Gov. Bruce Rauner is adamantly refusing to provide any help whatsoever to Chicago, which is struggling mightily under the weight of years of fiscal misfeasance, until his Turnaround Agenda demands are met. A long-sought education funding reform bill, a 911 emergency call center fee, even a […]

House Speaker Michael Madigan was his usual self during the final week of the General Assembly’s spring session, passing bills to make one point or another, but not actually accomplishing anything. Bills are routinely moved in the House for the sole purpose of creating TV ads or direct mail pieces or newspaper headlines. Madigan’s only […]

A new statewide poll finds that strong opposition to an income tax hike to solve the state’s budget problems significantly eases when the tax increase is coupled with a property tax freeze. That’s important because Gov. Bruce Rauner has insisted that he won’t approve any tax hikes or a budget without a four-year property tax […]

Democrats have been privately grumbling for a while now that Gov. Bruce Rauner isn’t truly interested in good faith negotiations on a balanced budget with economic reforms to end the two-and-a-half-year Statehouse stalemate. But Senate President John Cullerton spent days and days negotiating the details of a four-year property tax freeze with Rauner, only to […]

The thin-skinned, strong-arm Statehouse partisanship of the past two and a half years reached out and infected the Illinois Conference of Women Legislators’ annual fundraising gala last week. COWL is a bipartisan organization which raises money every year to “assist mature women who wish to continue their undergraduate education,” according to its website. “The goal […]

Illinois has elected just two wealthy people to major statewide office in the last 20 years: Former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald and Gov. Bruce Rauner. Both candidates won because they ran as firm, anti-establishment outsiders. Fitzgerald was best known as a state Senator in the 1990s for railing against the elders who ran his Republican […]

Congratulations, everybody! Illinois now has five public universities with junk bond credit ratings. That has to be some kind of record. Last week, S&P Global Ratings lowered the credit score of both Southern Illinois University and Western Illinois University into junk bond status. Eastern, Northeastern and Governor’s State were already in junk bond territory and […]