General Assembly would have been better off doing nothin’ for Comptroller

I prefer when the law gets written in a neutral way, and the political partisanship factors could go either way – they’re unpredictable.

Which is why I wasn’t enthused with the General Assembly’s actions on Thursday by which Illinois will have a special election to pick a new state comptroller come 2016, even though the current term of office is to run through January 2019.

FOR THE RECORD, both the state Senate and Illinois House of Representatives voted Thursday in a special session (whose legitimacy is questioned by those who believed the current Legislature adjourned for good back in November) to pass a bill that creates a special election to fill constitutional offices if more than two years of a four-year term remain.

Gov. Pat Quinn still has to sign the measure into law. But he said Thursday he’d go along with it. This bill likely will be his last act as governor before Bruce Rauner assumes the position come Monday at noon.

All of this came about because of the death nearly one month ago of Judy Baar Topinka – who was elected back in November to another term as Illinois comptroller. That term would have begun Monday and would run through January 2019.

Without this change in law, there were no provisions for special elections. So Topinka would have been replaced by a gubernatorial appointment. Someone literally would get a full four-year appointment without being elected first.

SOME PEOPLE ARE claiming to have serious objections to such a concept. I don’t so much, largely because I accept the fact that we give governors significant authority to make appointments and fill vacancies.

People who have a problem with Republican Rauner having that kind of power (and I’ll be the first to admit I’m not enthused about the idea) perhaps should have thought more thoroughly about who they voted for last year.

I accept that the power to pick a replacement for Topinka will fall to Rauner, just as it would have fallen to Quinn had he been able to win re-election.

Somehow, the Legislature’s actions on Thursday do come across as changes in law motivated purely by political partisanship – particularly since the circumstances the state faces in replacing Topinka are ever so unique.

WE MADE LONG-RANGE changes in state law to fit these particular circumstances. That just seems wrong! And short-sighted.

Unless people think a future Legislature will make further changes to fit whatever future circumstances might happen to occur. If that is true, that is just scary!

Although to hear Republican partisans rant and rage about the Democratic-controlled Legislature’s actions on Thursday came across as ever so self-righteous because they were pushing for a concept that I find equally appalling – the idea of merging the treasurer and comptroller’s offices into one post.

The “Comptroller of the Treasury” is one overly-pompous title I have heard used for the merger. Considering that these are offices to which Democratic candidates often get elected, it seems the GOP merely wants to reduce the opposition party.

I STILL BELIEVE the financial safeguards that caused these duties to be split between two separate constitutional offices are necessary. I believe we can’t be too cautious.

I also wonder if political officials would come to see one combined office as a political plum that would give their party significant benefits – along with leaving the opposition party with nothing at all! Never underestimate the potential for greed amongst government officials.

The idea of merging the two offices was ignored on Thursday, which was good. Although I’ll be the first to admit it was most likely motivated by a desire by Democrats to stick it to Rauner – whose campaign rhetoric of “shaking things up” all too often comes across as wanting to reward his own interests at the expense of others.

There was no “good guy” on Thursday at the Illinois Statehouse, just some evidence that the next four years are going to be a particularly ugly partisan spat in Springfield.

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Who’s going to out-politick whom on fate of Illinois comptroller post?

Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner let it be known this week whom he plans to pick to replace the late Judy Baar Topinka to serve as Illinois comptroller. But that doesn’t make the future’s post any more secure.

For now that we know Leslie Munger is the new person in charge of making sure government bills get paid in a manner sort of resembling being timely, it seems Rauner is pushing for the post’s abolishment.

ACTUALLY, HE WANTS a merger of sorts between the comptroller and the Illinois treasurer – the office that oversees the state’s financial investments and other income.

It has been a long-running political debate over whether state government finances ought to be overseen by two officials who hold state constitutional officer titles. It seems that Rauner wants to use the Topinka death as momentum to push this issue now, when in the past it has always limped along and withered away.

Now I know there are those who think this appropriate – they say Topinka herself favored merging the two offices, and that this could be her legacy. But I can’t help but be skeptical.

Perhaps it’s because I know my local history and remember the name Orville Hodge (the one-time state financial official who wound up doing prison time for his government antics).

IT WAS WITH that in mind that when the state Constitution was last re-written in 1970, delegates decided to split the duties related to state government’s financial tasks.

In essence, one person is in charge of bringing in as much money as possible for the state to spend, with another person being in charge of signing off on the checks that are issued to pay the state’s bills.

It provides a sense of ‘check and balance’ that I actually find appropriate. I’m not sure what is really gained by wanting to have one person serve as an all-powerful treasurer.

Except that some people see the concept of having that all-powerful person and get greedy at the concept of having that official on their side in partisan political maneuvers. Just like the idea of having a lottery to break the tie on a political redistricting panel was supposed to scare people into being afraid their side would get nothing, but instead their greedy nature makes them enjoy the chance to get all – and totally screw over the opposition!

RAUNER MADE IT clear this week that his appointment of Munger was part of a larger effort to have voters decide in the 2016 elections whether the two posts would be merged into one.

Whether such a plan can gain traction will depend on how it is worded, and which position is perceived as being the one done away with.

Which is why I found it laughable that Illinois Treasurer-elect Michael Frerichs issued his own statement this week saying he favors doing away with the comptroller post in 2016 – as though that is a big conciliatory gesture!

For one thing, his proposal merely protects himself. I don’t think Republican political interests (including Rauner) will meekly go along with that.

PLUS, I THINK it shows Frerichs’ political cluelessness if he really believes that can happen.

For the voters back in November chose Topinka to serve a four-year term running from Monday through mid-January of 2019. Whether there has to be a special election in 2016 to pick someone to finish the last two years, or whether Munger gets to have a whole four-year term without being elected has to be decided.

But we’re going to have the two positions in place at least through then – there’s no getting around that! Whether some time in the 2020s the two posts can be combined is a different issue. But it’s not going to happen anytime before then.

There’s still time between now and then. Let’s hope sense prevails and we don’t get a restructuring of our government just because current officials have dreams of more power for their partisan side!

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EXTRA: Treasurer-elect Mike Frerichs

It seems we finally have a new state treasurer. And no, we didn’t have to endure a lengthy legal fight along the lines of the Gore v. Bush battle of 2000.

It was Wednesday morning that Republican nominee Tom Cross decided to concede defeat to Democrat Mike Frerichs in the Nov. 4 elections. Even Illinois Republican Chairman Tim Schneider went along and issued a statement along those lines, although he seemed more interested in praising Cross than admitting GOP defeat.

THEN AGAIN, I don’t think Frerichs – a state senator from Champaign -- cares, so long as the record shows he got more votes than did Cross – a state representative from Oswego and former Illinois House Republican leader.

For the record, it seems that Frerichs got about 9,400 more votes than did Cross – taking barely over 48 percent of the vote to Cross’ just under 48 percent. The remainder of the ballots actually cast went to Libertarian nominee Matthew Skopek.

There are those who are ranting that Chicago and suburban Cook County “stole” the election – mostly from people who truly do not comprehend how small their rural counties are compared to the inner part of the Chicago metropolitan area.

Although for those who were going out of their way during the past two weeks to see daily updates about the vote (as assorted mail-in and provisional ballots continued to be counted) noticed that Frerichs crept into the lead earlier this week and managed to hold it BEFORE the final Chicago/suburb totals were in.

FOR THOSE WHO want to think Chicago rammed a Democrat through as state treasurer against their will, it would seem that what the Chicago-area vote did was bolstered the margin of victory.

Instead of winning by a few hundred votes, Frerichs becomes treasurer-elect by a figure just low-enough that it can’t be rounded off to 10,000.

Which is still a close result for a statewide election in which about 3 million people cast ballots. If anything, it may be some of those outer counties that kept Cross from the office that way too many political observers wanted to believe he was going to win.

Frerichs actually won Will County with 58.5 percent of the vote, and also took north suburban Lake County. And his suburban Cook percent was only 53.67 percent.

WHICH COULD WELL be why Cross chose not to get involved in any kind of demand for a recount – which is not something Illinois law allows for on an automatic basis.

He saves himself significant legal expenses, leaves open the option of a political future (by not being a sore loser), and only manages to offend the hard-core Republican partisans who can’t get over the fact that having a gubernatorial nominee who took 101 of 102 counties does NOT mean a political wipeout of the opposition.

As for those who are going to rant about “stolen” elections, I don’t think the rest of us should be too concerned. Those people were going to be offended no matter what happened – and they’ll probably revert back to ranting about Kennedy/Nixon of 1960 before long.

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It only takes one to win

I recall an Election Night back when I was at the old City News Bureau when one of my brand-new colleagues was confused about the vote-counting process – she didn’t get why there were still votes being counted on a Wednesday afternoon.

Me being the “old pro” (I think it was my second election cycle I covered), I knew about the assorted ballots that don’t actually get counted until days after Election Day.

ALTHOUGH THE VOTES that do get counted usually offer up a clear-enough picture of “Who won?!?” that nobody really cares about the exact total.

It takes an election cycle like the one currently taking place for Illinois treasurer to remind us that there’s a reason it matters that the official vote certification doesn’t take place until December (as in the 8^th, when the Illinois State Board of Elections will give us the final totals that will be recorded for political geek posterity).

For it has been just over a week since Election Day, and we don’t know yet who our new state treasurer is (although Republican Tom Cross has said he thinks it will be him, while Democrat Michael Frerichs says he’s not giving up).

I have noticed the Capitol Fax newsletter out of Springfield has put on its website a gadget that tries to give us the up-to-the-minute vote total. Although the fact that rural counties are doing nothing to update their total until the last possible minute means we really don’t know who won.

AS OF MID-DAY Tuesday, Cross allegedly had 1,671,018 votes to 1,670,526 votes for Frerichs. There also were 144,614 votes for Libertarian candidate Matthew Skopek.

When turned into the percentages that most people seem to prefer to think of, Cross has 47.93 percent of the vote to Frerichs’ 47.92 percent – with just over 4 percent for Skopek.

Considering that vote-by-mail ballots will stop being accepted on next week Tuesday, there are the prayers that an overwhelming Cook County vote (9,000 provisional ballots that have to be determined whether or not they are legitimate and count for anything) could somehow push Frerichs over the top.

Although there are others who think the fact that 101 rural counties went for Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner means they could also provide just enough additional votes to withstand any gains made by Frerichs – who as a Champaign resident wasn’t exactly someone Chicago voters were going to take up the cause of as a political crusade.

IF CROSS, WHO supposedly was the favorite because of his name recognition – although I doubt most real people have any clue who the legislative leaders are, with the exception of Michael Madigan – winds up winning, it would be something of a gain for Republicans.

I have heard some political operatives go on and on about how this is now a Republican-leaning state government because four of the six state constitutional officers would be of the GOP persuasion (nobody voted for Lt. Gov.-elect Evelyn Sanguineti specifically, but she counts as an individual).

Which is probably the reason why Democratic political operatives would like to win the post. It would make this the election cycle in which the political parties traded posts, rather than lost anything.

Although I don’t know anyone who’d trade “governor” for “treasurer.”

I’M NOT ABOUT to predict how close this one will wind up – although I realize that it only takes a one-vote margin to win the post for the next four years.

Perhaps we’re on our way to an Illinois version of that 1948 election for the Senate from Texas – where Lyndon Johnson got his victory by 87 votes.

“Landslide Lyndon” has more of a ring to it than any kind of nickname that would get tagged to either Cross or Frerichs. Although I’m sure either one would eagerly take a lead – no matter how slim it appears to the public.

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EXTRA: Pols a little too self-righteous when it comes to Dixon official

We’ve all gotten a good laugh off of the public official in Dixon, Ill., who originally was suspected of ripping off as much as $30 million from her city, but now has officials saying she enriched herself by as much as $53 million.

SIMS: Crooks are everywhere, she says

Quite a sum, considering that Dixon’s total annual budget in recent years has only been about $8 million.

YET IN RECENT days, we’ve had some Chicago political types taking a little too much pleasure in bringing up the Dixon situation, where Comptroller Rita Crundwell faces charges that claim she took municipal funds for herself (much of which allegedly enriched her horse farm) during a 22-year period.

Cook County Commissioner Deborah Sims of Chicago’s Far South Side and surrounding suburbs brought up Crundwell earlier this week when criticizing a measure meant to make county board members more accountable for the way they spend expense money.

She’s right that some people are too quick to toss out the “crook” label when it comes to the Chicago political establishment but would never think of using it for political people outside of the city.

But Sims seemed just a bit too eager on Tuesday to trash someone else, rather than trying to figure out how to resolve the problems locally.

SIMS ISN’T ALONE. Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, told reporter-types in Springfield this week that a measure to merge the state comptroller and treasurer offices into one government post is bad because you don’t want so much financial power invested in one person.

Because that, supposedly, is what the real problem is in Dixon.

MADIGAN: Dixon the example of what's wrong



Personally, I agree that merging the two state offices is a short-sighted move (one that probably would result in another measure 20 years from now to split the duties back into two positions). But I’m inclined to think that government in Dixon is on such a smaller scale that it is near-to-ridiculous to treat it as comparable to state government. It's only natural that a small municipality can get by with fewer people than the government of the state of Illinois.

Sims and Madigan come off as Democrats too eager to rub it in the face of the town that likes to think of itself as Ronald Reagan’s birthplace.

IT IS AS politically-partisan a maneuver as any of the trash talk that conservative ideologues have engaged in when trying to trash urban interests. It is just as petty!

For our officials to gain the “moral” high ground, they have to act above such tawdry behavior.

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Has a perennial idea’s time come?

It has been a decade since I was one of the reporter-type regulars at the Illinois Statehouse, yet I can remember one of the perennial ideas people would latch onto if they wanted to gain some public attention for themselves was the concept of merging the state comptroller and Illinois treasurer into one single office.

To show how most political people didn’t take the idea too seriously, my lasting memory was of then-state Rep. Cal Skinner, a Republican from the Crystal Lake area, wisecracking that having a chief financial officer would mean Illinois would have a “chief f.o.,” a dull remark for which he actually got laughs from his colleagues.

BUT NOW, IT seems that Republicans are hoping to make this issue something a little more real. Their nominees for treasurer – state Sen. Dan Rutherford of Pontiac – and comptroller – former state Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka – both said recently they would work together to ensure that one of their political positions no longer exists.

In an attempt to undermine the ability of Topinka and Rutherford to turn this perennial political issue into something of significance, Topinka’s Democratic opponent, state Rep. David Miller of Lynwood, said he is willing to back the idea.

Even Democratic treasurer nominee Robin Kelly says she could back the idea, saying, “leaders must pursue every avenue to save money,” and also claiming she had the idea first.

How can Topinka use this issue to bash Miller (or Rutherford to attack Kelly) if, theoretically, they support the same stance? In political-speak, Miller’s action “takes the issue off the table” as a campaign matter.

NOT THAT I expect this will cause Topinka to shut up about it. She wants to be able to use this issue, which on the surface sounds like something so incredibly obvious that we wonder why the drafters of the Illinois Constitution didn’t just do it that way when they put the current document together back in 1970.

Oddly enough, it was Illinois’ long-standing history of potential for political corruption (people like Rod Blagojevich are petty compared to Paul Powell or Orville Hodge) that made the good-government types who were part of the Constitutional Convention insist that there be two separate people of equal authority as state constitutional officers who have a say in state finances.

In theory, either one of them could “rat out” the other if something fishy were taking place. And neither one has complete financial authority, meaning that one’s ability to enrich themselves with some sort of scheme would be limited.

For the record, the state treasurer’s office is the one that oversees Illinois government’s financial investments. That person does whatever possible to try to make the state more money.

THE STATE COMPTROLLER’S office has no say over those investments, but has control of the state’s checkbook – so to speak. That person’s staff handles the actual payment of bills, and they are the ones who have to decide when there is a financial shortfall such as we are experiencing these days who gets paid late, and who gets paid ridiculously late.

So is it irresponsible to put all this financial responsibility into the hands of one official. The Topinka/Rutherford financial monster says that modern technology would make it easier for other people to track finances and serve as a watchdog, should a chief financial officer decide to try something funky.

Oddly enough, Miller and the Topinka/Rutherford two-headed beast are trying to spin the issue differently.

Miller wants to talk about government ethics, saying a streamlined government would be easier to monitor for ethical flaws.

FOR TOPINKA/RUTHERFORD, THEY want to cite cost-savings Twelve million dollars is the cost they estimate would be saved by turning two constitutional offices into one.

There’s just one problem. This isn’t something that a governor can just enact through executive order, or even the General Assembly pass into law by a mere majority.

This is a part of the Illinois Constitution, just like those provisions related to redistricting that wind up resolving the issue of control of the process by a purely-random lottery (which was another good-government idea that was supposed to encourage compromise because political people would supposedly fear a random draw and the possibility of getting nothing).

Which makes it easy for anyone to say they favor this idea now, because it doesn’t mean their job would suddenly disappear after Election Day.

WE’RE TALKING CONSTITUTIONAL amendment, which is deliberately a difficult (if almost impossible) process to navigate.

Sixty percent of the Legislature has to agree on the issue, then it would have to go on the ballot for voter approval. And there are restrictions for how many amendments can be on any given ballot, which means the powers that be could always decide to crowd up the ballot with other issues so as to squeeze this one off altogether.

Even if citizens concerned enough about the issue were to try to go the other route to pass petitions to force the issue on the ballot, there are restrictions on what kinds of issues can be addressed by that route. Illinois’ courts have historically shown a willingness to knock down just about anything that anyone tries to push for an amendment through that route.

My point being, this isn’t going to happen anytime soon – if ever – no matter who wins those particular campaigns come Nov. 2.

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