It's Up to Rank-and-File Lawmakers to End Budget Stalemate

A Reboot Illinois Editorial

Dear rank-and-file lawmakers,

We hope your day off Saturday was splendid. We hope it gave you time to truly consider how absolutely essential it is to end the Illinois budget impasse during your remaining three days of the current legislative session. We hope it gave you time to cool your heads and to look deeply inside your hearts.

Illinoisans cannot wait until after your election for you to decide whether many of us live or die, grow or wilt, learn or suffer from neglect.

You stand on the precipice. You hold in your power the ability to lean forward and hurtle us toward more pain, suffering and degradation. You possess the strength as well to pivot and turn to a compromise that can put us on a path forward, confronting our challenges and rebuilding a path to true hope and prosperity.

A pivot to a compromise, for many of you, means defying the legislative leader you elected and who plays no small part in helping you stay re-elected. We speak, most certainly, about defying Democratic House Speaker Michael J. Madigan who, it seems patently clear, is intent on playing out his personal, political power game of mass destruction. We ask you to rise up for what is right and against political expediency.

After Tuesday, May 31, compromise becomes tougher because any deal will require more votes to pass. Some of you might think it would be safer to wait until after the November election, until you are securely re-elected, to vote for tax increases or reforms.

To wait will be a blatant and nearly criminal disregard of your constitutional duty. It will be a morally bankrupt course that causes untold thousands more Illinoisans more needless anguish.

Generations of children in Chicago and across great swaths of communities that dot the Illinois prairie will suffer irreparable harm. Entire communities built up around our public community colleges, colleges and universities will sag toward collapse as enrollment declines, housing stock sags and businesses shutter.

You might convince yourselves it isn’t so, but you simply are wrong.

• Hundreds of layoffs already hit real humans and their children at Eastern Illinois, Western Illinois and Chicago State.
• Some high schools in central Illinois already don’t offer foreign languages. How has that ever been acceptable?
• Superintendents say they need to know by July if they can open in August.
• Unemployment rose in every one of our 102 counties in April compared to last April for the first time in six years.
• We’ve neglected our elderly, our disabled, our infirm. Homelessness and violence are on the rise. Rape victims can’t get the counseling they need. We could continue, but we won’t.

Democrats and Republicans, your refusal to find a way forward caused all of that.

The impasse must end now or, we suspect, some of your careers will end in November.

The impasse must stop. It can be done.

House Democrats, you rose up before in your caucus. You defied your leader and approved minimal funding for colleges. Seven of you stood again last week and voted against a Mike Madigan spending spree more than $7 billion out of whack. Do it again. Bring more of your colleagues along with you.

House and Senate Republicans, you must know Gov. Bruce Rauner prolonged this impasse by expecting far too much from a Democratic majority state and demanding far too much from labor. He won election on a platform of change in a Democratic state, not in a land of Republican revolution. Rauner could have led a public discussion of how we should overhaul the state’s tax system; of what will work and be fair and legal to save pension funds. He should have used his bully pulpit to talk about how we can make government more efficient and where we can trim. Our governor did none of that. He overreached.

House and Senate Republicans, you must compel him to govern with reason and in reality.

Senate Democrats, you can and must send a message that compromise and leadership must make a comeback in Illinois.

All of you, rise up. Put aside politics, egos and gamesmanship today. Fight for compromise. Fight for leadership. Fight for statesmanship.

All of that is within reach, from what we hear of your rank-and-file working groups.

• It will, indeed, take cuts, change and tax increases.
• It will take recognition that spending and taxing alone is doing the same thing over again. And that truly is insanity.
• We know from one working group that there was talk of a 4.85 percent personal income tax rate, as well as a tax on services.
• We know Rauner has recommended purchasing reforms as one way to cut and save us all money.
• We know Illinois homeowners need relief from the highest property taxes in the nation.
• A compromise can include all of those, as well as some workers compensation changes that demand better from the insurance industry and a more reasonable causation standard than the governor pitched, but one that is higher than no change, as Madigan first mandated.
• We must address the pension pandemic threatening workers’ retirement security and the financial futures of our children and grandchildren. We should test the consideration model Democratic Illinois Senate President John Cullerton has advocated for years. We should end pension spiking while we’re at it.
• And, we beg you, fix the school funding formula that cripples so many of our children simply because of the happenstance of where in Illinois they are born.

You possess the power at this defining moment for all of us in Illinois. End the impasse. Defy your leaders. Bring compromise back.

We implore you. Dig down deeply in the next three days. Do what you know is right and just. Give us all a fighting chance for an improved future here, in the home we love: Illinois.

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