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| GOP adds Lisa to 'hit' list |
So learning Monday that the GOP was adding the Illinois attorney general to their BossMadigan.com list of political people we should vote against was surprising only in the sense of “Why did they wait so long to do it?”
YOU’D
HAVE THOUGHT that picking on the daughter of the House speaker would have been
a move they would have made early on.
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| Schneider speaks out against Illinois AG |
The Illinois Republican Party, which is continuing for the 2018 election cycle in its strategy of trying to get voters to believe that Madigan, as in Michael, is all that is wrong about government, and anybody who associates with him also needs to be dumped.
Replaced,
of course, with a Republican official who’d be willing to vote in lock step
with the ideals of Gov. Bruce Rauner – who actually is dipping into his
personal fortune for several millions of dollars to pay for all this
politicking.
He
wants re-election next year real bad – primarily because he doesn’t want to go
into the history books as “Gov. Gridlock, the guy whose own partisan political
games prevented the state from ever approving an operating budget during his
governing stint.
BECAUSE
THAT’S THE direction we’re headed in, unless something seriously shifts on the
political partisan scale.
That
is part of what Illinois Republican Chairman Timothy Schneider (also a Cook
County Board member) had in mind with his Monday morning conference in which he
trashed the speaker’s daughter – which is something political insiders know you’d
best not do.
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| How will speaker choose to retaliate? |
Michael Madigan tends to take it personally when someone says something nasty about his daughter, and usually figures out a clandestine way to retaliate.
So
I can’t help but wonder how far up Schneider goes on the Dem hit list for his comment,
“Lisa Madigan is working for the speaker, not the people.” Or his other line about how the Madigans are, "stop(ping) reform by causing a crisis."
EVEN
THOUGH IT can be argued that the attorney general, by trying to force the state’s
ongoing (for nearly two years) budget stalemate to come to a head, she is
acting on behalf of the people.
What
we have is Rauner wanting to tie in other issues to a budget while Madigan (the
speaker) wants those other issues (many of which would harm organized labor
interests) dealt with separately.
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| The ultimate beneficiary? |
Because he knows that separately, the Illinois General Assembly can be counted on to kill them off. Only by forcing them to be part of a budget agreement that must be approved do they have a chance to become reality.
Lisa
Madigan has used her post to put political pressure on the sides of state
government to force them to get around to passing a budget sooner, rather than
later.
SPECIFICALLY,
SHE WANTS a court to rule that the state payroll cannot continue to be met once
the month ends, unless a budget is in place. Which is in accordance with the
spirit of the state Constitution that says a budget must be approved by the legislature
and governor for government to operate normally.
A
hearing is scheduled for next week, and we could learn something before Feb.
28. Unless government officials can get their heads out of their partisan
behinds and work together by month’s end, we could get the sight of government
employees not getting paid.
Which
would put them in the same category of those Illinois residents who rely on
government programs whose funding is on hold, or the public school systems that
are months late in getting the aid payments they rely on for their funding. Or
those public universities that are losing students (with Chicago State U.
facing possible closure) because of the uncertainty.
That’s
a lot of angry people who will be prepared to blame everybody, and not just
Mike Madigan, for Illinois government’s flaws. Which might make Lisa Madigan
the most responsible person we have on the Illinois political scene.
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