Heading into the final hours of the General Assembly’s spring legislative session on Friday, lawmakers’ to-do list has been pared down to the bare essentials as they prepare to leave Springfield seven weeks earlier than their usual end-of-May sprint.
The two largest check boxes on that list are the state’s next annual budget and a slew of legislation that aims to address voters’ growing concern over increased violent crime. In both arenas, Democrats who control state government are seeking to minimize the party’s vulnerabilities in a high-stakes election year.
With more than a day to go before lawmakers’ scheduled adjournment Gov. JB Pritzker and the Democratic leaders of the state House and Senate announced an early agreement on top-line elements in the state’s budget Thursday afternoon. Pritzker, who is seeking a second term in November, characterized the spending plan as “a tremendous example of what can be accomplished with responsible Democratic leadership.”
“I hope it will provide a light of hope and help for our citizens in the months to come,” Pritzker said.
Whether any of the $1.8 billion in tax relief included in the Democrats’ framework — or the attempts to expand the state’s law enforcement toolbox in response to a bump in crime — will register with the public remains to be seen, however, as their rollouts intertwine with heated campaign rhetoric over the coming months.
Dems on defense
Ending legislative session in early April, before the bulk of lawmakers’ typical spring workload would normally begin to even hit its stride, is a consequence of moving Illinois’ primary election from its usual mid-March date to late June — a timeline that neither advantages or hampers either party, but one that Democrats who control Springfield picked last year as a result of COVID-delayed Census data compressing the schedule for drawing new congressional maps for the state.
Redistricting was one of several issues Democrats muscled through the General Assembly last year, while simultaneously pushing for a massive climate and energy plan, eliminating Illinois’ last remaining law restricting abortion access and a slew of other progressive priorities.
But after a year marked by Democratic might, 2022 has so far been comparatively muted for the majority party.
Between this spring’s truncated session and the heightened political stakes that always accompany an election year, power dynamics in the Capitol have undergone a quiet but dramatic shift: Despite controlling every conceivable lever of state government as the party with total power in Springfield, Illinois Democrats in the past few months have been forced into a defensive posture, both in direct reaction to the Republican super-minority in the legislature and changing political winds that favor a GOP wave this at the ballot box this fall.
Amplifying those partisan pressures are a confluence of outside forces that have grown too big for Democrats to ignore, including an overwhelming desire among Americans to fully move past the crisis phase of the pandemic, rising inflationary pressures and a nationwide sustained increase in violent crime since COVID-19 hit.
As concern over violent crime overtakes other issues on voters’ minds, Republicans have seized on the opportunity to focus their messaging, painting Democrats as “weak on crime” and forcing the majority party on the defensive.
“Violent crime continues to surge as Pritzker and Springfield Democrats keep pro-criminal, anti-police policies in place,” screamed a recent all-caps press release from the gubernatorial campaign of GOP hopeful Richard Irvin. Backed by billionaire conservative donor Ken Griffin, Irvin has touted his expansion of Aurora’s police force in his nearly five years as mayor, and is leaning into his background as a prosecutor to solidify his “tough on crime” persona.
In response to that messaging, the Democratic Governors Association, a political organization Pritzker has supported financially as recently as December, returned fire with a big TV ad buy last week, doubling down on the primacy of crime in the governor’s race by highlighting the worst violent crimes Irvin’s clients were accused of during his career as a criminal defense attorney.
“Irvin has been getting rich by putting violent criminals back on our streets,” the ad’s narrator bellows after listing a series of heinous acts, including child molestation. “Tell Richard Irvin to stop pretending to be tough on crime and start supporting policies to keep people safe.”
GOP operatives all over the country are employing the “weak on crime” tactic against Democrats, but Republicans in Illinois have been able to exploit the timing of a major criminal justice reform package the majority party passed in early 2021, which was followed by another devastating year of violence in Chicago.
Though the major thrust of the so-called SAFE-T Act — eliminating the use of cash bail in Illinois — won’t go into effect until January, Democrats’ rationale for overhauling pre-trial detention is not easily explained in a soundbite, hashtag or other medium primed for internet virality.
State Rep. Kam Buckner (D-Chicago), who also serves as the House Chair for the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus and helped shape the SAFE-T Act last year acknowledged the difficulty Democrats have in telegraphing policy nuances to the public.
“It’s also a problem for Democrats nationally that Republicans are very good at messaging because ‘no’ is so much easier than a real idea or a real solution,” Buckner told NPR Illinois. “This is the thing: Democrats have to respect that [legislators] have to go home and sell what we do here. My district is different than a district in the Metro East or a district in East Central Illinois. But the thing that binds us together is our Democratic principles.”
In the hours leading up to the SAFE-T Act’s passage in early 2021, opponents to the legislation harnessed the power of social media to reignite simmering outrage that lingered after a summer defined by racial justice protests that occasionally turned violent.
The police murder of George Floyd in May of 2020 prompted a national conversation about the disproportionate involvement that law enforcement and the criminal justice system have in minority communities. But mostly peaceful protests hijacked by looters, along with rare clashes between civilians and police evolved from mere distractions to real liabilities for those who sought to use the moment to spur fundamental policy changes.
By the time lawmakers were debating the eventual criminal justice reform package several months later, the spike in violent crime that accompanied COVID’s first year had already changed the conversation around law enforcement. And despite months of hearings around criminal justice reform, the state Senate’s middle-of-the-night debate and passage of the cash bail elimination bill gave Republicans another easy mark against the legislation, only strengthened by a series of fixes to the law last year necessitated by drafting errors and other red flags raised by county prosecutors across Illinois who are responsible for implementing cashless bail in their jurisdictions.
While GOP lawmakers repeatedly call for the repeal of the entire law before cashless bail goes into effect, Democratic lawmakers are feeling the squeeze from their communities too, particularly in places where violent crimes like carjackings and organized retail theft have increased or popped up for the first time in recent memory.
In a series of statehouse news conferences over the past week, Democratic lawmakers have trotted out about a dozen proposals aimed at targeting crime, expanding violence prevention programs and bolstering resources for law enforcement, while staying far away from anything that could be construed as undermining the core of the SAFE-T Act.
Speaking to reporters last week, State Sen. Robert Peters (D-Chicago), Senate Chair of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus and a top negotiator on last year’s criminal justice package, laid down his parameters for the current crop of reforms lawmakers are weighing. The proposals Peters and his colleagues introduced that day included measures like finally funding a long-neglected state-run witness protection program and setting aside grant money for anonymous tip lines to report crimes.
Peters and progressives like him are also steering clear of legislation containing penalty enhancements, which he maintains would be a return to “the failed tough-on-crime status quo” policies that defined the 1980s and ‘90s, ballooning Illinois’ prison population.
“I had another shooting on my block a couple weeks ago. People are sick and tired of the failed status quo,” Peters said. “They are sick and tired of — excuse my language — this bulls***. And I am sick and tired of it, too. Our communities need to be heard. Our leaders must be brave.”
After months of private negotiations, public discussion of Democrats’ crime-deterrent legislation is finally being made public after a two-week stretch where Pritzker was handed a crime-related defeat from his own party. Democrats in the Illinois Senate joined with Republicans to vote down one of the governor’s appointees to the state’s Prisoner Review Board after two others resigned before facing likely the same fate.
Senate Republicans, the caucus with the least power in the past few years, began banging the drum about the governor’s PRB appointees on the last day of lawmakers’ spring session last May. Though their counterparts in the House initially resisted joining the fight, after 10 months of pushing the small group of GOP senators successfully won the fight after threading together accusations that Pritzker’s appointees had voted to put “cop-killers” on parole. The governor reacted by comparing the Republicans with right-wing conspiracy and extremist group “QAnon.”
Republican State Rep. Ryan Spain (R-Peoria), who heads the House GOP’s political arm, acknowledged Thursday that Republicans’ optimism for November is at least due in part to the success of the GOP narrative on crime, but that the real-world “terrible consequences” of a crime surge more than cancels out any perceived victory on messaging.
“I don’t ever enjoy winning a messaging war with terrible policy decisions that create divesting consequences for the people that we represent,” Spain told NPR Illinois. “So yes, we’re winning the messaging battle on crime but we have people who are being murdered, being terrorized.”
Democrats in the House put forth their own proposals earlier this week, including a bill that would create a new type of crime dubbed “predatory vehicular hijacking” and a corresponding punishment for adults that coerce minors into carjacking. State Sen. Eva-Dina Delgado (D-Chicago) declined to label her proposal as a penalty enhancement, and instead characterized it as a new tool for deterring crime.
“This is something that prosecutors can use to send a very clear message about the focus that we have on protecting our youth,” Delgado told reporters Wednesday.
As negotiations on crime-related legislation wrapped up in the wee hours of Friday morning, it was unclear whether that idea would make it into the final package despite passing the House earlier this week. Delgado’s bill, just like a slew of others, passed easily with near-unanimous support, including from Republicans loath to vote against a bill labeled anti-crime.
A more robust and longer-discussed idea to address so-called smash-and-grab robberies orchestrated by groups that sell stolen goods online was also on ice late Thursday, despite months of talks between Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office, the influential Illinois Retail Merchants Association and a bipartisan group of lawmakers.
That proposal would create another new classification of crime called organized retail theft and force third-party online retailers to verify that sellers are listing legitimate merchandise instead of hawking stolen goods. But opposition from a coalition of groups that advocate for domestic violence victims threw a wrench in negotiations this week.
In shaping this spring’s anti-crime package, Buckner said he’s neither frustrated by Republicans’ messaging nor his caucus’ fissures, instead saying he’s optimistic.
“There may be folks who are [frustrated] and I’m happy to have those conversations with my colleagues,” Buckner told NPR Illinois late Thursday. “The sausage-making is ugly and it’s nasty and it stinks. But I think we’re getting to where we need to go on this.”
Other measures aimed at stemming a trend of retirements from police forces and otherwise supporting law enforcement with more resources and funding are easier sells. State Rep. Lindsey LaPointe and State Sen. Rob Martwick, who share territory on Chicago’s northwest side, both face Democratic primary challengers with backing from Chicago’s police union.
In the preliminary proposals Democrats introduced this week, the pair were responsible for carrying bills aimed at mental health services for first responders, incentivizing police officers to stay on the force longer and more resources for law enforcement.
Martwick told NPR Illinois that solving crime has to be a “two-pronged approach” that both addresses the root causes of crime and violence — though those solutions are long-term investments and far from overnight fixes — as well as immediate support for law enforcement.
“We also recognize people need public safety,” Martwick said. “They need to be able to feel safe in their communities and in their homes, in their cars.”
In responding to Republican claims that her bill was an effort in “CYA” — an acronym for “cover your a**” — for Democratic lawmakers engaging in “revisionist history” on criminal justice reform, LaPointe earlier this week grew frustrated with the GOP’s consistent return to blaming the SAFE-T Act for a rise in crime.
“The effective date for eliminating cash bail in the state of Illinois has not yet arrived,” LaPointe said. “If we look at the evidence, we will see that gun violence began to go up around March 2020…To point to one law that went into effect incrementally, that is not fully implemented yet, as the cause of the pain that people around the whole country are feeling is an affront to victims of crime and is truly ignoring how we can sustainably reduce crime to get public safety for everyone.”
But not 10 minutes later, it wasn’t another GOP member referencing the SAFE-T Act, but fellow Democratic State Rep. Fred Crespo (D-Hoffman Estates).
“Many members in this House supported [the SAFE-T Act] because we realized that we needed structural changes in our broken legal system,” Crespo said, addressing Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth (D-Peoria), who has been leading closed-door negotiations on this spring’s package of bills addressing crime. “There are a lot of good things in that bill. But like any big bill, we always find out later on, ‘Wait a second, there are some things that maybe we should tweak…I just feel that a lot of these concerns and issues have fallen on deaf ears.”
‘It feels a little gimmicky’
As is true in any midterm election cycle, the party that holds the White House faces political headwinds as the other party can pin blame on the president for any number of ills, whether warranted or not. The “Blue Wave” election cycle in 2018 not only sailed Pritzker to an easy defeat over unpopular Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, but also delivered Democrats their biggest-ever super-majorities in the legislature as suburban disgust over President Donald Trump resulted in some surprise Democratic wins.
But four years later, the political landscape has shifted significantly, and Democrats at all levels are playing defense.
COVID itself, as well as the deep divisions the pandemic sowed, continue to color most all of American life — a hurdle Democrats have stumbled to clear. Though fear of the virus itself has declined significantly over the past year that vaccines have been widely available, related economic stresses remain.
Inflation, which had ballooned to a 40-year high in the past year, has now been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exploding oil prices set in the global marketplace. As a result, drivers are paying the highest gas prices since July 2008 at the height of the Great Recession.
“These are pressures that people are feeling at the gas pump, at the grocery checkout line, they’re feeling them really everywhere that they go,” Pritzker said Thursday when announcing the deal on a budget framework.
To that end, Democrats’ spending plan includes $1.8 billion in mostly one-time tax relief for Illinoisans in the form of tax holidays and rebate checks, made possible by better-than-expected state tax revenues — a rare occurrence in a state with a national reputation as a financial mess.
Though Illinois’ fiscal house has seen a dramatic improvement over the past year or so, Republicans are leaning into voters’ natural skepticism after decades of disproportionately negative headlines about the state’s money woes. Taking the lead from Republican lawmakers, Pritzker’s GOP challengers have spent the last two months since Pritzker introduced his budget plan characterizing it as full of “election year gimmicks” funded by federal funding.
It’s a contention that is only nominally true, as Illinois’ economic recovery from the pandemic has been fueled by funneling aid to consumers via stimulus checks, supporting struggling businesses via grant funds and building the infrastructure of mass COVID vaccination and testing that has made a return “normal life” (and spending) possible for most people.
But the narrative of Illinois’ fiscal mismanagement is useful — and vivid. State Rep. Tom Demmer (R-Dixon), a lead budget negotiator for the GOP, on Thursday pushed on a sore spot for the governor: voters’ rejection of Pritzker’s signature graduated income tax plan in Nov. 2020.
“A year and a half ago, Gov. Pritzker was threatening Illinois voters with draconian cuts or across-the-board tax increases unless they approved his $3.4 billion tax increase amendment,” Demmer said in a statement. “But voters said no. Now, as Gov. Pritzker is running for re-election, he’s used the avalanche of federal bailout cash to paint a rosy picture of the state budget.”
Democrats’ spending plan will include a six-month pause on an automatic 2-cent increase to the state’s motor fuel tax, set to jump with the new fiscal year on July 1. Illinois’ 1% tax on groceries will also be suspended for a year.
Those elements — along with doubling the state’s existing property tax credit program to allow for rebate checks up to $300 for homeowners — were included in the budget proposal Pritzker presented to lawmakers in early February.
New in the waning days of session, however, is a one-time direct payment to the approximately 90% of Illinoisans who earn $200,000 or less annually — $400,000 for joint tax filers. The checks are not large; Adults are eligible for $50 checks, with an additional $100 for up to three dependent children.
In a victory for progressives, the state’s earned income tax program will both increase the amount of money low-income Illinoisans can get in their tax refund and permanently expand eligibility for the program. Under the Democrats’ agreement, EITC will be made available to an estimated 2.7 more Illinoisans: young adults between ages 18 and 24, seniors 65 and older and non-U.S. citizens who work and pay taxes as “ITIN” filers.
“When this budget passes, the governor and the legislature will be saying, ‘Illinoisans, we hear you,’” House Speaker Chris Welch (D-Hillside) said Thursday.
Two Democratic legislators who spoke on the condition of anonymity told NPR Illinois that the planned $50 checks were not terribly popular within either Democratic caucus, and predicted it wouldn’t be all that popular with constituents either.
One of the members said it was a total miss to not use the extra revenues — “a once in a lifetime opportunity” — to make a much bigger lump sum payment into Illinois’ pension systems than the $200 million contained in the budget deal. Along with $300 million in federal stimulus money committed to the state’s pension fund last month, the state will be saving an estimated $1.8 billion over the next few decades. But the member said it could have been much more.
“Every crisis we’ve had in this state financially has been caused by surging pension debt when we have down years,” the Democrat said. “And when we have down years, we’ve either cut spending on pensions, which has only made that problem worse, or we’ve cut back on essential services like education, healthcare and human services.”
The other Democratic member agreed, echoing Republicans’ favorite recent criticism to use against Pritzker.
“I think for people that make a substantial amount, a $50 or $100 check is not going to make much of a difference in their lives,” the member said. “I think those individuals might prefer to see the state putting that money to a different use, [like] investing in critical human service programs. It feels a little gimmicky.”
Madigan hangover
After more than a decade of using former longtime House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago) as their number one campaign issue — to varying degrees of success — Illinois Republicans this cycle now have a surplus of campaign themes that have already proven effective.
But the GOP was given one more electoral gift recently: Madigan, who was forced to give up the Speaker’s gavel early last year as he lost key support from his own caucus amid a growing federal corruption investigation, was indicted in early March.
Democrats struggled to contend with the former speaker’s refusal to leave his many powerful posts even as federal prosecutors’ case built up around him. Republicans successfully used Madigan as Exhibit A of political corruption in Illinois — a more potent comparison after the speaker was named “Public Official A” in charging documents alleging he was the target of a years-long bribery scheme in the summer of 2020 — as reason for voters to reject both Pritzker’s graduated income tax and Democratic state Supreme Court Justice Tom Kilbride in the last election.
Building on that progress in what could prove to be a Republican wave year, Rep. Spain sees a golden opportunity to leapfrog from the super-minority — at least in the House — to a possible toppling of Democrats’ majority, however unlikely that may be. That’s even after Democrats were able to draw the most politically advantageous legislative maps for themselves last year without the judicial scrutiny that’s toppled other blue states’ efforts to gerrymander.
The recently (and aspirationally) renamed House Republican Majority has successfully recruited dozens of candidates to run in 90 of the 117 Illinois House districts — twice the number of seats the GOP currently holds. And Spain said he and HRM Executive Director Jayme Siemer will work to get even more onto General Election ballots this summer through the slating process.
Though many Democrats — particularly the 19 progressives who credit themselves for blocking Madigan from a 19th term as speaker — feel they’ve done what they can to distance their party from the former speaker, others see danger ahead.
The power vacuum left when Madigan vacated both the speakership and his post as chair of the state’s Democratic Party kicked off internal squabbles between factions who see Pritzker’s personal wealth as the safest protection mechanism in the 2022 campaign cycle and those loyal to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, both of whom have for years taken care to distance themselves from Madigan, but who have rifts among themselves.
Replacing the fundraising and election ground game Madigan built over decades has been no easy task, and House Democratic members in particular have confided worries about the first election cycle without Madigan at the helm. But 15 months after his exit from Illinois politics, Democrats have no choice but to chart new waters themselves.
