Hot Topic of the Week:
When you hear a candidate of the majority party running for a seat in the Illinois House say: “I am committed to listening to all views and working with anyone to create the most efficient, transparent and beneficial system.” (an actual quote from someone wanting to become one more member of the Illinois House super-majority), you should refrain from laughing out loud and should instead pat that person on the head in a solicitous way and tell him/her that the facts of life will be explained after Election Day.
First, we need to start off with a little math. To say that there’s a true balance of power in the General Assembly would be a corruption of the word “balance”. Of the 118 members in the Illinois House, 78 (67%) are Democrats. Since under normal circumstances it only takes 60 votes (50%) to pass any bill through the House, it means that for a Republican bill to pass, it would require all Republicans to vote “Yes” along with 20 Democrats. For a Democratic bill to pass, 18 Democrats could join every Republican and vote “No”, and the bill would still pass.
Keep that in mind as I try to describe to you the process by which a good bit of the legislation that comes out of Springfield is assembled.
There’s a process in the House known as the “working group”. A working group is an informal body that meets to hash out solutions to problems which then find their way into bill form. Working groups are creatures of the Speaker’s office, and the Speaker has the ability to name whomever he wishes to be a member of the group. The most recent example is the “Public Transit Working Group” to address a coming fiscal cliff for mass transit agencies in Illinois. It will be co-chaired by two Chicago Democrats and will have 13 other House Democrats, and no Republicans, even though there are a number of Republican representatives (yours truly among them) whose districts are served by Metra and Pace. The fiscal cliff is real, and it’s estimated that next year the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) will have a $730 million financial shortfall. That’s not just Democratic money or Republican money, it’s YOUR money that they’re coming after. But Republican members have no say in how we’re supposed to avoid going over the cliff. Again, we’re treated as mere potted plants.
The House Democratic Caucus has launched working group after working group claiming to focus on the tough issues Illinois is facing, none of which have a single Republican member. The “Public Transit Working Group” is the newest group to be formed. Other groups already formed are:
- New Arrivals (migrant) Working Group
- Teacher Shortage Working Group
- Firearm Safety Working Group
- Public Safety Working Group
- Reproductive Health and Dobbs Decision Working Group
Take a hard look at the list above and tell me which have been successful in solving the problem they were meant to address.
In January, when House Democrats launched the “New Arrivals” working group, Representative Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz (D-Glenview) was asked why the GOP was left off. Her answer was classic Marie Antoinette:
“The working group process has been a successful process through which the Speaker has really tackled big issues where we are going to need to arrive at consensus within our caucus. As you can imagine, a meeting with 78 members [of the Democratic caucus] would be challenging. So the working group process has worked effectively for us as a caucus in order to reach consensus. But the working group process isn’t a committee process, per se.”
Talk about “let them eat cake”! Her utter disdain for the process of open dialog and compromise tells you all you need to know about the corrupting influence of super-majority governance, which won’t get better by addition.
Not to mention the fact that anything that goes on in the working group is done behind closed doors so when working group ideas become law and fail, they can blame somebody else for that failure.
It’s times like this you actually start to miss Mike Madigan. At least every once in a while, he would let Republican legislation make it out of committee and on to the floor of the House where it could actually get voted on whether it had 70 Democrats supporting it or not. After all, every dog wants to have a bone thrown its way now and then.
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