Because when I think of our Legislature returning to Springfield on Tuesday to once again ponder what to do about state government’s financial status, I keep hearing in my head that old song that Dolly Parton turned into a hit.
IT WAS “HERE You Come Again,” and it was the southern-accented tale of a woman whose life kept getting screwed up by an unscrupulous man who keeps popping into her life and making a mess of it.
I’m starting to wonder if the General Assembly is doing the same thing to us with their repeated trips to the Statehouse to pretend to be putting together a budget – only to be unable to do a thing and digging us Illinois taxpayers into a deeper hole with their continued inactivity.
Because when I study the situation regarding the state budget, the conclusion I keep coming to is that we’re no closer to having a real balanced budget in place on Monday than we were back on May 30 – the date that it was supposed to get done.
By now, Gov. Pat Quinn should have gone through the formality of putting his signature on the document that would give state government the spending proposal by which it would operate for the fiscal year that begins Wednesday.
INSTEAD, WE HAVE nothing.
We have a budget plan that Quinn refuses to approve because it only provides spending priorities for state government to operate for the rest of 2009. The Legislature would have to return in November for their fall session and include more rounds of negotiations in order to ensure that government continues to operate between Jan. 1, 2010 and June 30 of next year.
Quinn is being responsible in refusing to go along with such a scheme.
But that is about the only hard-and-fast rule I can cite with regard to these negotiations – which I must admit I have no clue how they will turn out. This year has given us some of the most bizarre set of circumstances ever (and consider that in the past couple of years, we had budget negotiations that didn’t even come close to meeting the deadline).
WE HAVE THE budget deficit that could be between $7 billion and $9.2 billion (Quinn cites the latter figure, but his critics say he’s exaggerating so as to try to justify that income tax increase he keeps calling for).
Yet even at $7 billion, that is a significant budget hole that cannot be plugged by just cutting spending in government agencies.
Yet the people in the Legislature who usually get all worked up whenever the word “Tax” comes up are digging in their heels to prepare to vote “no” to anything resembling that Quinn tax hike (which if it ever does get approved would likely put Quinn’s name in the Illinois history books right next to that of Dick Ogilvie).
In fact, there’s really only one thing that has changed between May 30 and Monday – the presence of Republicans.
THE FACT THAT the Democratic majorities in the state Senate and Illinois House of Representatives are no longer large enough to pass a budget all by themselves means that GOP legislators will have a say.
But rather than being a presence for good and toward compromise, Republican legislators are showing themselves as being just as petty and partisan as their Democratic Party colleagues.
Republican legislators these days seem more interested in pushing the notion of passing a resolution that would allow state government to operate at 2009 fiscal year levels for a month. By that time, they figure, there would be some real solution.
Yet if there were going to be a “real solution,” it likely would have been reached during the past month. If the Legislature really thinks they can get away with voting for a continuing resolution on Tuesday, then go home while Quinn and the four legislative leaders negotiate the real solution, they had better guess again.
FOR ALL THAT is taking place these days is that the Republican legislators who until June 1 were irrelevant to the problem are showing that they’re just as capable of doing nothing as the Democrats in the General Assembly.
That is something we ought to keep in mind next year during the election cycles when the GOP inevitably claims that all Democrats are like Rod Blagojevich and that Democratic officials have too much influence.
Perhaps they do, but I’m not seeing much in the way of evidence that they have any real solution. They seem to be just as much a part of the problem.
Does this mean that stubbornness and incompetence in political officials is a bipartisan concept? It would appear neither political party has a monopoly on the inability to achieve a legitimate solution to our state’s budget problems.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: From the circus-like atmosphere of the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday to the (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-lawmakers-springfield-budgetjun29,0,3117471.story) nonsense-like rhetoric of the General Assembly on Tuesday, it is uncertain which environment Pat Quinn will find more ridiculous.
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