Find the logic here:
The people who run the Illinois legislature passed a
budget over the weekend and largely ignored everything
Gov. Rod Blagojevich wanted. No surprise there. It was
clear way back in February, when the governor served up
his annual budget address, that he wasn't going to be a
factor this year. When nobody trusts you—nobody trusts
you.
But in passing a budget that is way out of whack
(lawmakers have pretty much admitted they don't have
the money to pay for all the spending they approved)
they have managed to make Blagojevich relevant again.
Suddenly, he's Mr. Responsibility. He has to use his
veto power to balance this budget.
Imagine that. You have to go some to make Blagojevich
look like the adult in Springfield. But that's what the
legislature did.
There is some saving grace in what happened—rather,
what didn't happen—down in the capital. The legislature
didn't ram through who-knows-what's-really-in-here
legislation to expand gambling and spend billions on
roads and bridges.
So maybe everybody can take a deep breath and find out
what mischief they were up to in the aborted
gambling-infrastructure package.
There is one thing the legislature did
do right. It sent to the governor an ethics bill.
Yes, you heard right. An ethics bill. In Illinois. Pick
yourself off the floor. It's not law yet. The governor
apparently has his own mischief in mind.
The bill would prohibit businesses seeking state
contracts of $50,000 or more from making campaign
contributions to the state officeholder who awards the
contract, or to any candidate for that office.
It wouldn't stop contractors from giving money to state
lawmakers, though legislative leaders have plenty of
influence over who gets state business. It wouldn't
stop contractors from giving money to political parties
instead so that they could funnel it to the candidates,
as Senate President Emil Jones kept repeating back when
he thought he could stop his troops from passing the
bill.
What it would do is help to shut down the opportunity
for the governor to feast on pay-to-play politics. It
would help to shut down the governor's prolific
fundraising machine, and anyone who doesn't think
that's a good idea hasn't been paying attention.
It's a good bill. But Blagojevich has been warming up a
familiar ruse: He's been hinting that, instead of
signing the bill, he'll send it back to lawmakers with
"improvements" they won't be able to swallow. In
Springfield, that's called "loving a bill to death."
It's transparently bogus.
This bill has been a long time coming. A version of it
passed the House 116-0 way back in March 2007. The
Senate sat on it for months and months while Senate
leaders said they were working on how to "improve" it.
That ruse was transparent too. The jaw-dropping
testimony in the federal trial of Blagojevich crony
Antoin "Tony" Rezko apparently convinced the Senate
leaders it was time to quit stalling. They couldn't
afford to be seen as protecting the pay-to-play culture
on brazen display in the federal courthouse.
The Senate finally voted 56-0 on a barely tweaked
version of the bill. The House quickly and
overwhelmingly approved it.
So it's off to Blagojevich. There's no telling what
sort of amendments the governor has up his sleeve this
time. Remember how he made the mass transit bill
"better" by insisting, completely out of left field,
that senior citizens must be allowed to ride free?
Lawmakers let him have his way because they didn't have
the votes to override a veto.
But this time is different. Lawmakers have made an
unusual public pledge to defeat any attempt by the
governor to kill the bill with poisonous improvements.
They have the votes to override any changes he makes.
Blagojevich could save himself some embarrassment—and
maybe even regain some trust of Democrats and
Republicans—if he would just sign the bill.
 |
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
The development and hosting of Senator Rutherford's web site are not paid for with taxpayer dollars. The phone line and internet service for Senator Rutherford's e-mails are also not paid for at taxpayer expense. | |||||