Independent campaign expenditures have skyrocketed this year in state legislative races. All of these numbers were current as of 4:20 p.m. Friday, March 13, when I finished writing this column. Independent expenditure committees are not allowed to coordinate their spending with candidates, ergo the “independent” label. As with the federal level, they are also not […]
Politics
Posted inRich Miller
Resign-and-replacement schemes
Remember the national uproar last November when U.S. Rep. Chuy Garcia bowed out of his reelection race at the last minute and quietly passed petitions to put his chief of staff Patty Garcia on the ballot? We saw a lesser, but still quite palpable mass grumbling when state Rep. Marty Moylan (D-Des Plaines) did the […]
Posted inRich Miller
Chuy Garcia and the machine
You likely already know that U.S. Rep. Chuy García (D-Chicago) dropped out of his re-election race in a way that essentially handed his seat to his top aide. After his doctor advised him not to run again because of his heart condition, and his spouse who has multiple sclerosis which didn’t respond to her most […]
Posted inOpinion
Ruminations atop the impeachment toboggan hill
The end game, now, seems clear. After a bit more polling and watching CNN and letting the man in the White House just keep going, Republicans in Congress likely will take the easy way out and appoint a special prosecutor to do the dirty work. And so Donald Trump stands ready to rival Zachary Taylor […]
Posted inOpinion
Many more “heroics” may be required
PHOTO BY ALAN SOLOMON/TNS Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever thought that Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration could ever keep state operations running for a year without an actual state budget. State and federal courts have ordered about 90 percent of state spending since the General Assembly’s Democrats and the Republican governor deadlocked on a budget […]
Posted inOpinion
Pots and kettles
The late Mike Royko, Sun-Times columnist Bruce Rauner is trying to divide Downstate from Chicago over school funding. It’s a low tactic that has a long tradition, as I noted in this column from the IT of June 5, 1981. The much longer original will appear on my blog, Second Thoughts. Chicagoan Mike Royko declared […]
Posted inOpinion
Failing on his mandate
PHOTO BY ALAN SOLOMON/TNS Near the top of any list of Illinois government’s many problems is that House Speaker Michael Madigan has made a decades-long game out of messing with the minds and the agendas of our governors. If there’s one constant since 1983, it’s Speaker Madigan’s jiu-jitsu moves against whoever happens to be governor. […]
Posted inOpinion
Get out of the way
PHOTO BY ALAN SOLOMON/TNS With yet another poll showing plunging Downstate support for Gov. Bruce Rauner in a Republican district and the intense Republican freakout over Donald Trump’s impending presidential nomination and its impact on independent suburban women, there appears to be a growing feeling among Democrats, particularly in the Illinois Senate, that they need […]
Posted inOpinion
Off the rack
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE I took in two things during lunch the other day. One was bean soup. The other was Goethe’s observation that the nobleman “tells us everything through the person he presents, but . . . the burgher simply is, and when he tries to put on an appearance, the effect is ludicrous […]
Posted inOpinion
Bruce Rauner, progressive
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Daydreaming the other day, I ran through my head some scenes from my imagined movie remake, Mr. Potter Goes to Springfield, in which Capra’s naïve do-gooder Jefferson Smith is replaced by Henry F. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. However, our own Mr. Potter, Bruce Rauner, also brings to mind real […]
Posted inOpinion
Imagining revolutions
PHOTO BY Anthony Souffle/TNS Drowsy after a heavy holiday meal, I settled in to finish Stefan Zweig’s classic 1934 biography of Marie Antoinette. As I drifted in and out of sleep, the Versailles in Zweig’s account of the final days of Louis XVI and his queen faded and was replaced in my imagination with the […]
Posted inOpinion
Closing a deal
Bruce and Diana Rauner PHOTO BY ZBIGNIEW BZDAK/TNS Trust me, readers, I am no more eager to write another column about the closing of the Illinois State Museum than you are to read it. I have been moved to do it because the most important aspect of the story is the one that remains the […]
