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Illinois Issues
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Editor's Notebook: Lawmakers will want to slip quietly past controversy this spring

Peggy Boyer Long
WUIS/Illinois Issues

A couple of months, give or take. That’s all that’s left on the calendar before lawmakers close business at the Capitol and head home to a summer of fish fries, county fairs and music fests.

For now, there’s still plenty to chew on in Springfield. The governor wants control of education. Doctors want lower insurance bills. And local officials want better odds they’ll win something in the casino sweepstakes. Yet it’s likely lawmakers have their eyes fixed on November 2 as much as on May 21. 

Between adjournment and the fall election, candidates for the General Assembly will go trolling for votes. And they’ll use those hometown meet-and-greet festivities to exploit difficult votes taken in these next weeks by vulnerable, so-called targeted incumbents. 

Given that, legislators from both parties will want to slip quietly past controversy this spring. As reporter Pat Guinane wrote in our February issue, this session is prime target hunting season.

As it happens, Pat will be our guide. He became Illinois Issues’ Statehouse bureau chief last month. Pat replaces Aaron Chambers, who now covers state government for the Rockford Register-Star. 

We’re fortunate to have Pat. He comes to us from the Capitol bureau of Lee Enterprises, which owns newspapers in the Quad Cities, Decatur and Carbondale. Last summer, he earned a master’s degree through the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He earned his bachelor’s from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, where he was an editor of The Daily Eastern News. He put in reporting stints at Oster Dow Jones Commodity News in Chicago, the suburban Tinley Park Star and the Beverly Review in Chicago, near the neighborhood where he grew up on the city’s Southwest Side. 

As a Public Affairs Reporting intern last spring in Copley News Service’s Statehouse bureau, he saw “up close and personal” the complex interplay of policy and politics. 

Pat covered a proposal by clout-heavy SBC Communications to allow that company to double the rates it charges competitors for leasing its phone lines. Despite well-organized opposition, the measure sped through the legislature in four days and flew across the governor’s desk in a matter of hours. “You had to study on the fly as much as you could,” he says. 

Though a federal court in Chicago later blocked that provision, Pat says watching the measure go from bill to law so quickly offered a textbook example of how Illinois government really works and “who we sometimes have to help to get things done.” 

“I think it’s our job to write about that. And try to show it for what it is. We can’t take a side. We have to present the facts in a way that lets people connect the dots on their own.”

And that’s what makes covering Illinois politicians so interesting. “They’re taking the public’s money and acting with the public’s trust. As a citizen, you might question why they’re doing what they’re doing. As a reporter, you get to delve more deeply into it. Of course, in this state that will often take you to the State Board of Elections’ Web site and campaign contributions to figure out who might be helping whom.”

Such an approach should put Pat in good stead in a session when the major policy issues — education, medical liability and gambling — will surely draw a horde of well-financed interest groups to the Capitol. 

He’ll be helped, and ably so, by the magazine’s own Public Affairs Reporting intern, Bethany Carson.

Bethany, who grew up in Algonquin, graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. She spent a year as the managing editor of The Chronicle, a weekly newspaper in Hoopeston, before returning to graduate school. 

Since she joined the magazine in January, Bethany has written about some of the more high-profile issues lawmakers face, including efforts to reform medical malpractice and to supplant the state’s education agency.
On the last point, Gov. Rod Blagojevich wants to move school administration from the State Board of Education into a new department under his control. In this, he has support from the state’s major teachers’ unions.

Convincing legislators may not be so easy. Lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle seem leery of turning so much power over to a rookie governor whose leadership capabilities have not yet been fully tested. Credibility is especially critical to lawmakers when it comes to elementary and secondary education. School policy and finance affect every region of the state. 

The Blagojevich Administration already has developed a reputation for keeping a tight lid on details. And some lawmakers don’t trust what details they do get. This was most evident in testimony during the Senate’s unusual Committee of the Whole on the governor’s plan. 

And members of the Senate’s Black Caucus are concerned the plan won’t solve inequity in funding or help minority students.

These wrinkles might get smoothed out. But it’s also likely the governor will have to settle for pieces of his plan then simply declare victory.

Full-fledged reform of the state’s medical liability system is even less likely this year. It’s clear there are problems: Every day lawmakers hear from more Illinois doctors who are leaving for other states where they’ll pay less for malpractice insurance. 

But as Bethany reports this month, three of the most politically savvy interest groups — trial lawyers, doctors and insurance companies — stand at opposite ends of this highly partisan issue. Lawmakers may have to settle for slapping a temporary Band-Aid on this problem.

And here’s the wild card: riverboat gambling. A lucrative auction of the state’s available license has dollar signs dancing in politicians’ heads. State law limits the market to 10 licenses. But lawmakers are murmuring about upping that to 11, even 12.

As Pat says, who knows what could happen at the end of the session when officials begin looking for ways to erase the state’s $1.7 billion deficit — and lawmakers begin looking for solutions that seem politically palatable. 

 


Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.

 

Illinois Issues, April 2004

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