Fueling discord, Blagojevich issued ultimatums while legislative leaders continued to negotiate the budget without him. Of course, the legislative leaders also remained entrenched in their own agendas.
The state's top lawmakers didn't play nice in the sandbox this year. They threw temper tantrums and blamed each other for the lengthening stalemate over the state budget.
At the end of July, they even excluded Gov. Rod Blagojevich from closed-door negotiating sessions, a sign of frustration over his short attention span and his mind-boggling persistence in pushing an unpopular wish list.
Who could win on this? The stalemate ended up leading to the longest overtime session in Illinois legislative history, bruising state government's image in the process, says John Jackson, a visiting professor of political science at Southern Illinois University's Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.
In addition to failing to address issues important to constituents' everyday lives — skyrocketing electricity rates being the most prominent — Jackson says negative opinions about the state's political leadership worsened amid "the wrangling and the personal animosity that [seemed] to be the No. 1 story almost every day."
Another spoiler in this unhappy tale is Blagojevich. His uncompromising stance struck out with House Speaker Michael Madigan, a fellow Democrat who methodically eliminated each of the governor's proposals from the table and remained locked on trimming the state's revenue and spending priorities.
Senate President Emil Jones Jr. played a problematic role, too, by aligning himself with Blagojevich from the start in hopes of getting more money for education.
Yet Jones' support wasn't enough to advance the governor's proposals through his own chamber because his Democratic Caucus was far from unified, negating the 37-member majority that could have been used to approve a state budget without Republican votes.
Still, after voting for a one-month budget to cover July, lawmakers did approve — by an overwhelming, bipartisan majority in both chambers — a $59 billion fiscal year 2008 basic operations budget. A capital plan was left in the drawer. That was August 10.
The story doesn't end there, though. As the State Fair got into full swing in Springfield, the governor hadn't signed the budget or vetoed it outright. Instead, he announced he would cut $500 million and target those dollars for uninsured Illinoisans. But in his maneuvering, Blagojevich stuck it to lawmakers by eliminating $200 million in "pork" projects in their districts. We won't read the next installment, courtesy of lawmakers, until later.
The governor has been at odds with the General Assembly all session. The spring momentum on proposals to overhaul school finance and pay down public employee pension debt stalled because the governor threatened to veto any increases in income or sales taxes to cover the additional costs.
Fueling discord, Blagojevich issued ultimatums while legislative leaders continued to negotiate the budget without him. Of course, the legislative leaders also remained entrenched in their own agendas. By early August, a government shutdown loomed.
The discord dates to the governor's first term, but it worsened when he introduced his fifth state budget proposal in March. Blagojevich wanted to use a so-called gross receipts tax to fund a multibillion-dollar program providing state-sponsored health insurance to adults. He also wanted to levy a smaller tax on businesses that have more than 10 employees and don't offer health insurance to pay for the program. Business groups framed the plan as the largest tax increase in Illinois history.
Political scientist Kent Redfield says any major tax increase would have been hard to swallow, but Blagojevich's approach would have required an even bigger gulp.
"He has done the absolute world's worst job of both preparing people for those proposals and negotiating those proposals," says Redfield, a professor of political studies with the Center for State Policy and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Springfield. "His leadership style and negotiating style makes a bad situation worse."
The gross receipts tax, which would have taxed all business revenues rather than profits, was estimated to net $7.6 billion a year in revenue for the state. However, it generated so much negative press that the House rejected the idea on a nonbinding vote of 107 to 0.
The governor didn't flinch. He stayed on message throughout the summer: Approve his form of universal health care for adults or forget his signature on other items important to leaders, including funding for education and mass transit.
But a string of accusations and ultimatums failed. Even after introducing a scaled-backed health care plan, Blagojevich lacked legislative approval to get that plan into the state budget. And though lawmakers cut the governor out of budget negotiations, Blagojevich never stopped campaigning for his spending priorities.
While he held a news conference in Chicago about health insurance, for instance, leaders met in Springfield to discuss expansion of gaming as a way to fund education and construction projects. Meeting without the governor, they said, was more productive.
"We had less speeches, and I think that comes with less antagonism," said Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson after that meeting. "He's obviously the governor of this state, but it was a more business-like meeting."
Neither Republican nor Democratic leaders appreciated Blagojevich's overtime game plan, which started with a series of hours-long presentations given by the governor's "guest speakers."
"Pretty much more of the same," House Minority Leader Tom Cross said after one of the June budget meetings when speakers talked about tax increment financing districts in Chicago. "It's getting to the point [that] it's rather embarrassing and a bit disgusting."
To combat irrelevancy in the public's eye, Blagojevich resorted to bashing lawmakers for not working hard enough and threatening to keep the legislature in mandatory "special sessions" seven days a week until a budget landed on his desk.
Lawmakers were unfazed by his threats. They simply stopped showing up. Attendance dropped to a handful in some sessions.
Blagojevich also turned on his public relations machine and blamed Madigan, in particular, for the impasse, challenging his Democratic loyalty.
"It's kind of tough to get the speaker to come out from the shadows and make his opinions known because he likes to hide [with] his Republican friends and his Republican allies," Blagojevich told reporters after a July budget meeting in the Executive Mansion. "The speaker needs to break his alliance with the conservative Republicans and be a Democrat again. If the speaker does that, we can be out of here tomorrow."
Madigan fired his own public criticism.
"It appears to me that certain people are grasping at straws in terms of what they perceive to be a budget debate," Madigan said in one instance. "And I would say again, only one chamber has passed a budget. That is the House."
Madigan repeatedly referred to that early version of a House budget, which allowed for limited growth and had some of the necessary Republican support. But it was dead on arrival in the Senate.
As late as August 1, the governor sent a letter to legislative leaders of both parties stressing again that he wouldn't sign a budget that lacked key components of his original proposal, including more money for health care, education, pension reform and transportation.
"A 'take-it-or-leave-it' approach on a 12-month budget, sent to me as a government shutdown looms, will do nothing more than simply precipitate such a shutdown," he wrote.
Behind the scenes at the Statehouse, Blagojevich bypassed the legislature to maneuver his spending priorities into the budget approved by both chambers. He's done it before. In his first term, he skirted the need for legislative approval by issuing an executive order that dedicated millions of state dollars to controversial stem cell research.
True to style again this year, he never backed down from his grandiose wish list. Despite all evidence that lawmakers objected to most items, he was willing to stick it out as long as it took to get some form of what he wanted.
At press time, neither chamber had officially adjourned the spring session. That left the door open for additional spending or borrowing plans. A long-awaited capital budget, for instance, would fund road and school construction. The fall session also is right around the corner. Lawmakers and the governor could continue to hash out differences then.
But the damage likely has already been done to Blagojevich's agenda. His loss of credibility could work to his opponents' advantage throughout his second term.
The speaker may use this overtime session, however it turns out, as a warning to the governor: Tame your wish list and be willing to negotiate or prepare to play hardball for three more years.
"If the speaker wanted to get state spending under control and not hand the governor a big pot of new money to spend, then being in the situation we're in does, I think, work strategically to the speaker's advantage," Redfield says.
He adds that while the goal is to craft a balanced state budget, it's also to "settle the relationships between the legislature and the executive — and the speaker and the governor — so we don't have to spend three months leading up to this again a year from now."
Bethany Carson can be reached at capitolbureau@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, September 2007
