May 29--A note to Gov. Bruce Rauner:
You've nearly put your first spring legislative session behind you. The hazing hasn't been so bad. House Speaker Michael Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton and members of their caucuses now can explain to voters why they passed yet another of their intentionally unbalanced budgets. Mostly they want to scare you, then break you. You don't seem fazed.
The spring session has been Madigan and Cullerton's time. Now it's your time. You come across as a patient man who knows he was elected to govern for four years, not just the first five months. You also come across as a focused man. A governor who won't flinch.
Maybe, this summer, you'll find reason to explore Madigan and Cullerton's ethos: Nobody dares challenge us. Pat Quinn tried to challenge them a few times, but standing firm isn't his strength. They saw him as a guy who brings Squeezy the Pension Python to a knife fight. Time and again, they rolled him like a bowling pin.
Madigan and Cullerton thrive when their foes are playing their game -- striving for popularity, arm-twisting for votes, fussing over who wins the news cycle. They do skirmishes well. They haven't faced a governor who does wars.
They certainly haven't faced a governor who insists on doing what voters sent him to do: Change Illinois. This state brims with voters who see their older children leaving for better jobs elsewhere. Voters who see their younger children in schools where the interests of adults trump the interests of kids. Voters who fear that the busted budgets and pension giveaways of Madigan and Cullerton will translate into much higher taxation to pay for the debts and brain-dead business practices that put us where we are.
So when you say you won't ask taxpayers for a dime of new revenue until legislators give Illinois a better chance at scoring new employers, new hiring and new economic growth, fed-up voters know that the crony-coddlers in Springfield -- and their loyalists who live off state spending -- finally have met someone they don't frighten.
We all know Madigan and Cullerton didn't have the power to pass a big tax increase. If they could have, they would have. Even Madigan's "millionaire tax" went down to defeat. Did you see how hard he worked for that, Governor? How much floor time he devoted to it? How earnestly he cajoled? Then he lost. Lawmakers who might have caved to him know that voters now realize how prior management -- the two Chicago Democrats included -- has been the ruin of this state.
How could voters not know? Every day they awaken to fresh headlines about gigantic taxpayer debts and doomed pension funds and local governments flailing to avoid bankruptcy. A lot of them have had it with politicians who kowtow to the interests that keep re-electing them.
Madigan and Cullerton scold you for pitting your demands for tort, worker's comp and other reforms against their demands for high spending. Their minions keep whining that the budget process is sacrosanct -- you shouldn't use it as a tool. The paradox is that, for decades, they've used the budget as their tool for rewarding and punishing and getting their way. But, as of 2015, a budget can't be leveraged? Is that so.
Many reforms you propose make sense to voters. One example: paying public employees more, but tying their raises to the quality and scope of their performance, not on how long they keep breathing and coming to work. Let Madigan and Cullerton explain why this and your other ideas are cruel and unreasonable.
We won't get ahead of ourselves and anticipate whether you'll veto this overspent-by-billions mess of a budget outright, or use your amendatory veto to put the two Democrats' budget into balance. Nor will we anticipate whether summer brings a long legislative session over the budget, or a strike by state employees who resist changes in their next contract.
We aren't spoiling for a long, hot summer or a strike. But if they come, we trust you'll use the campaign funds you control to explain to the people of Illinois that there aren't enough taxpayers, or enough stupid employers, to stay in Illinois and fund its governments' enormous overhead. Other states offer better cost-benefit ratios -- and without all the politicians' relatives on the payroll.
Those states are poaching Illinois' future. You may be the last, best chance to protect that future by restoring growth. By restoring Illinois' prosperous past.
The Madigan-Cullerton strategy here couldn't be clearer: to obstruct any and all reforms, to vilify you for four years, and to install some malleable flunky in the governor's office.
Their strategy, though, is also their weakness: They're always angling for position, always wanting something.
You, Governor, are free to keep calm and stand pat. How liberating to answer only to the voters who sent you.
To want nothing, that is, but to revive the moribund Illinois of Mike Madigan, John Cullerton and ... their followers.
