Gov.
Rod Blagojevich made a last-minute attempt last week to at least show he was
trying to get the hopelessly stalled budget negotiations back on track.
Blagojevich, who has tried harder to avoid blame for the current overtime
session than to actually negotiate in good faith, walked into House Speaker
Michael Madigan's office unannounced last week in what was supposed to be a
dramatic gesture of goodwill and harmony among Democrats.
But
it was too little, too late. Madigan hasn't exactly been negotiating in good
faith, either, and he reportedly offered up no realistic alternatives during
the brief thirty-minute confab. Blagojevich had a smile on his face as he left the
Speaker's office, but it was clear from talking to him that he had run into a
brick wall. The governor also refused to back off from his ambitious,
multi-billion dollar health insurance plan, which has caused much of the rancor
at the Statehouse.
The
simple truth is that very few legislators in the General Assembly have ever
campaigned on providing universal health insurance, which is usually considered
a federal issue. Many, including Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, go so far as
to say that universal insurance ought to be a solely federal issue.
Late
last week, Daley finally urged Blagojevich to back off his health care
proposals. "You canÕt do [universal health insurance] city by city, county
by county or state by state. You wish you could, but you couldnÕt. Because say
if I have 500 employees... Now they come along and say, 'IÕm gonna charge you
extra to give everybody health care.' Well, why should I be in the state of
Illinois? IÕll go someplace else."
While
the vast majority haven't campaigned on universal health insurance, most
legislators have been campaigning for school funding reform and infrastructure
development for the past twenty years or more. As a result, the public and the
politicians are far more familiar and comfortable with those concepts, and they
were super-ripe for passage this year.
Instead,
what the governor did was essentially attempt to conjure a gigantic, expensive
issue from scratch, gin up a groundswell of support statewide and ram it
through the legislature in three and a half months, along with billions of
dollars for education funding reform and infrastructure development. So far, he
has failed on all counts. That sort of thing just doesn't happen here, or in
any other democracy for that matter.
The
bottom line is there simply isn't the will to increase state revenues enough to
do all three things - education, infrastructure and health insurance - and do
them right. Blagojevich's disastrous gross receipts tax proposal poisoned the
well even further against tax hikes by activating the business community like
it has never been before and calling enormous attention to the General Assembly
amongst an electorate that usually tends to ignore the body. He ended up
spooking legislators but good.
The
governor has a right to propose whatever he wants, but he should have at least
laid some groundwork during his campaign last year for such a massive expansion
of government. If he had, he could have claimed some sort of mandate this spring,
even with his less than 50 percent showing at the polls.
Instead,
he soft-pedaled everything during the campaign by saying he wanted to build on
his relatively minor health insurance accomplishments from his first term. It
was all non-threatening and benign. But his high-dollar Illinois Covered plan
has simply been too much of a shock to the political body. The fact that it was
essentially an empty press release bill that delegated most details to the
administrative rule-making process also doomed it from the start. Legislators
simply didn't trust the governor to follow through in a fiscally responsible
manner.
And
now they're all stuck.
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Rich
Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and
thecapitolfaxblog.com