July 10--Illinois' Democratic leaders handed Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner a big stick in December, evidently thinking he'd end up using it to penitently whack himself on the head.
The big stick was in the form of a budget crisis caused by a 25 percent rollback in state income tax rates and an 18 percent rollback in state corporate tax rates that took effect on New Year's Day.
Democrats had jacked up the rates in 2011, supposedly just for four years to get the Illinois fiscal house in order. But balancing the books wasn't that easy. Meeting pension obligations ate up most of the new revenue, and as the rollback deadline approached, it looked as though the estimated $4 billion annual drop in revenues would give the state a budgetary "heart attack," in the memorable prediction of Republican Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, who died a little more than a month after winning re-election last year.
In last fall's gubernatorial race, incumbent Pat Quinn, a Democrat, said he'd make the tax hike permanent so that vital state programs could continue to get funding. Republican Rauner told voters he could run the state without the higher rates, and could even increase spending on education and infrastructure.
It was as mathematically dubious and detail-free as campaign promises get, but it did the job. Rauner won by nearly 5 percentage points.
The Democrats, who control both chambers in the General Assembly, then chose not to try to extend the tax rates during the post-election lame-duck legislative session. Not because the voters had spoken and the Dems wanted to give Rauner a chance to run things his way -- please! -- but because they wanted to make Rauner eat his words along with a side dish of crow as he begged for a tax hike to help him produce a humane, balanced budget for the 2016 fiscal year.
Whether this was a strategic or simply peevish move, I don't know. But it was a gamble that anted up our most vulnerable citizens -- the poor, the elderly and the disabled, who rely heavily on state services -- and relied on the inevitable budget crisis to break Rauner's will and expose the empty, ideological naivete of his governing philosophy.
And how's that working out for them?
July is dragging on without a budget, and the effects of a government slowdown are beginning to spread. And Rauner's using that big stick of a crisis Democrats handed him as a cudgel to thump them for the many years of irresponsibility that put us in this fix -- and as a lever to try to force them into passing portions of his pro-business, anti-union agenda.
In the end, he'll probably lose the blame game. Governors, particularly Republican governors, tend to bear the brunt of public wrath when government programs and services start to shut down. Even weird moves like going to court last week to seek authority to pay state workers in the absence of a budget -- shortly after he vetoed a bill that would have paid state workers in the current budget year -- aren't likely to confuse the issue enough to save him.
But I don't see it ending soon.
Wednesday, Rauner dropped a nearly 500-page "compromise" pension proposal filled with money-saving ideas that are almost certainly unconstitutional and, as far as union-friendly Democrats are concerned, more poison pills than in Lucrezia Borgia's medicine chest.
To summarize the basic idea in these and a handful of related bills from Team Rauner: Illinois will be stronger if unions are weaker and workers have fewer rights. The wealthy will not be joining us in the "shared sacrifice" needed to improve the state's economy.
Thursday, a Democratic supermajority in the House passed, against Rauner's wishes, a one-month-only spending bill that postpones the days of reckoning. Because, you know, the two sides haven't had enough time yet to fulminate, paw the ground and impugn one another's motives and character.
We likely wouldn't be at this point, though, if the Democrats had owned the courage of their convictions late last year, taken the proper measure of the new governor and absorbed the blowback from unilaterally extending the tax rates.
The budget crisis, then, would have been a switch in Rauner's hand, not a big stick. And it would probably be well over by now.
ericzorn@gmail.com
