State
Governor says he’ll prioritize agreement with Democrats, which has eluded him so far
With lawmakers resuming their legislative session after a postelection hiatus, Gov. Bruce Rauner on Monday said his top priority was a full-year budget — a feat the Republican governor and Democrat-controlled General Assembly have not accomplished together since he took office in 2015.
Rauner called a Thursday meeting of the four legislative leaders from both parties, the first since he survived a bruising primary battle that showed a deep divide among Republicans. And he ticked off a list of other goals for the coming months that he said were “really bipartisan or nonpartisan” and “not about Republicans or Democrats.”
The agenda Rauner laid out, though, is largely a repeat of the wish list he’s been pushing for several years. Much of it has been aggressively opposed by Democrats or has stalled amid partisan rancor at the Capitol.
The governor’s list includes allowing local governments to ask voters about getting around union wage requirements and state rules for schools. It envisions state worker and teacher pension benefit cuts that likely will anger unions and invite a legal challenge. He wants state government to stop picking up teacher pension costs, even though he approved an education funding bill that has the state take on some of Chicago’s teacher costs. And he calls for term limits and changing a major tax credit program for businesses.
Missing from the list is one staple of the Rauner agenda, changing the way legislative district boundaries are drawn. Democrats drew the most recent House and Senate districts from which lawmakers are elected, and they’ve held control of the Capitol ever since. The governor used to group redistricting along with term limits as issues he wants resolved through constitutional amendments that take the power out of the hands of politicians.
But now he’s adopted it as a part of his re-election pitch, contending that voters should grant him a second term so that he can veto maps drawn by Democratic lawmakers after the 2020 census. Asked Monday why the redistricting issue had fallen off his list of legislative priorities, Rauner said it was a matter of editing things down.
“We’ve got to pick, you know, what we think we can get done in a spring session,” Rauner said at a news conference in Chicago. “I would love to get redistricting reform done, that would be fantastic.”
Senate Republican leader Bill Brady said the governor was focused on “highest priorities.”
“Clearly Mike Madigan and John Cullerton are not going to give us redistricting in the next 7½ weeks,” Brady said. “At least that’s my assumption. I assume it’s the governor’s assumption, without speaking for him. So focusing on what we can accomplish I think shows leadership on the governor’s part.”
Top Democrats at the Capitol haven’t been receptive to much of the governor’s wish list in the past, but spokespeople for House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton said they would attend the Thursday budget meeting.
And among Republicans, tensions are still high between Rauner and state Rep. Jeanne Ives, the Wheaton lawmaker who narrowly lost to Rauner in last month’s primary and represents a portion of the party that is deeply unhappy with him.
The primary produced bad blood between Rauner and Ives after the governor ran ads labeling Ives “Madigan’s favorite Republican,” a claim that was widely perceived as misleading. While the governor won the primary, his slim 4-point victory exposed a need to reconcile with social conservatives in order to put together the Republican votes needed to push Democrats to the negotiating table.
Rauner said Monday that his campaign had reached out to Ives but was told she didn’t want to talk to him.
“We called her, her office, right after the primary,” Rauner said. “We were told at the time that she did not have an interest in speaking with me or meeting with me at this point. That’s the current status. Hopefully, we’ll be talking soon.”
Ives spokeswoman Kathleen Murphy disputed the governor but showed little indication that she wanted to reconcile.
“Good grief. I would laugh if it wasn’t so sad,” Murphy said. “The governor is a professional liar. Our campaign made no such statement to the Rauner campaign. No such dialogue ever happened. And why would it? Why would Rauner desire to speak with ‘Madigan’s favorite Republican,’ right?”
Murphy went on to say that Rauner had made it clear he wants “Ives and conservatives out of the party” and that Ives was “done with this back-and-forth playground note-passing.”
Also at the center of Rauner’s fight with conservatives is the income tax increase that was enacted over his veto last summer. The governor campaigned on a pledge to roll back the increase and often criticized Ives for saying such a reduction couldn’t happen immediately.
But the budget proposal Rauner offered in February also did not account for an immediate drop in the tax rate, which is now 4.95 percent for individuals, up from 3.75. Instead, his budget plan would spend the extra money from the tax hike, while suggesting pension cost savings could generate as much as $1 billion to pay for a modest rollback of about a quarter-point at some point down the road.
To accomplish that, Rauner pointed to pension legislation introduced by Cullerton and co-sponsored by House Republican leader Jim Durkin. It passed the Senate last spring before stalling in the House. Rauner said the bill was “not perfect” but that he wants it sent to his desk.
Asked if the speaker would allow the bill to be called for a vote, Madigan spokesman Steve Brown said, “So far the sponsor has not persuaded many members that it meets the standards set by the Illinois Supreme Court in various pension rulings.”
Meanwhile, lawmakers soon could try to override the governor’s veto of legislation to license gun stores. Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Monday said he hopes he can peel off enough votes to override if Republican lawmakers move to the political center for the general election.
And by drawing attention to the governor’s veto, Emanuel also hopes to make Rauner pay for it in his campaign against Democrat J.B. Pritzker.
“There’s going to be a big election this November,” Emanuel said. “Now the governor will have to stand in front of the general election voters and say why something that 85 percent of the people in Illinois support, he opposed because it was too burdensome. His words ring hollow and empty.”
Emanuel has been highlighting other areas of commerce in Illinois that face regulations in an attempt to draw a contrast with Rauner’s refusal to regulate firearms. On Monday, the mayor repeatedly brought up a bill the governor signed last summer to fine restaurants that mislabel catfish.
Rauner has formed a public safety task force and invited legislative leaders to appoint people to the group in March, writing in a letter that “when we focus solely on guns, we become afflicted by a form of tunnel vision that causes us to ignore two universal and bipartisan concerns: guns in the hands of criminals; and guns in the hands of the mentally ill.”
He said Monday that the group would be “coming forward in the next few weeks with very specific proposals on a bipartisan basis.” And he said Senate Democrats had shunned the task force.
Cullerton has been critical of it, saying that “before assembling another batch of bureaucrats to ponder possibilities, the governor should take action on what’s right in front of him.”
On Rauner’s desk is a bill that would create a 72-hour cooling-off period after someone purchases an assault weapon. Such a law already exists for handgun purchases.
Asked Monday if he planned to sign the bill, Rauner said, “We’ll be talking about that as part of an overall package.”
