Politics – Rich Miller

“Sterigenics should be completely shut down until we determine it can operate safely,” gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker tweeted last October. A month after taking office, Pritzker made good on the first part of that campaign promise. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued a “seal order” which closed the company’s doors. Sterigenics sterilizes medical instruments at […]

One of the points that Gov. J.B. Pritzker has made since Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot began using the news media to ask for a multi-billion dollar state pension bailout is that other parts of Illinois are having the same problems as our largest city. Rockford is one of them, as the governor noted last week.  […]

 Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the $45 billion infrastructure bill into law last week during a three-day fly-around to several Illinois cities. It’s a good bet that the billionaire Pritzker paid for the plane that took him and whatever staff he brought to the various venues, since he’s regularly done that since taking office in January. […]

“We are so proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish this first legislative session of ours,” Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton told a TV interviewer earlier this month. “We said that we wanted to think big for the people of Illinois, we said that we wanted to get Springfield back on the track of working […]

 Back when this state was fairly well-run – meaning, before Illinois voters elected three anti-Springfield “populist” governors in a row – the general rule of thumb was that for every two dollars appropriated to K-12 education, higher education received one dollar. But that all started to change with Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who believed, with some […]

If you talk to the Statehouse old-timers, they’ll tell you they haven’t seen such a productive spring legislative session since Gov. Jim Thompson’s days. I think it’s probably safe to say that Gov. J.B. Pritzker cleared even that high historical bar this year, mainly because he had friendly Democratic super-majorities in both chambers. The Republican […]

 The governor and his top staff showed again last week that they can make things happen under the Statehouse dome. To corral 73 votes for a graduated income tax constitutional amendment in a 74-member House Democratic caucus accustomed to extreme coddling and over-protecting its more politically vulnerable members was quite something. Nobody was left off […]

As the spring legislative session nears its end, I want to take a moment to look back on one of the scariest times of the year with the hope that one of you might recognize something and help bring a deranged person to justice. You may have seen a brief news story about it, but […]

 If you want to see how times have changed this legislative session, take a quick look at Senate Bill 1591. The Illinois and Chicago-land chambers have been pushing legislation all session to offer state incentives to data centers, which stores massive amounts of electronic information. Illinois has been a national leader for data center locations […]

 If you listen closely to what Democratic state Reps. Sam Yingling and Jonathan Carroll are saying in public about their opposition to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s graduated income tax proposal, they appear to believe that Pritzker’s proposed tax rates aren’t high enough. Yingling and Carroll are both demanding significant property tax relief. “In Illinois,” Yingling wrote […]

 The Chicago Police Department reported last week that the number of people murdered in the city fell 10% during the first four months of 2019 compared to last year during the same period. While that’s good news and part of a two-year downward trend, lost in much of the coverage was a worrisome murder spike […]