No need to imagine if Rauner gone

The Illinois Policy Institute's Diana Rickert spent hundred of words in her Tuesday's Trib op ed pondering an Illinois General Assembly without Michael Madigan as House Speaker. Since Madigan will surely be re-elected Speaker, Rickert was left with 'imagining' a General Assembly without Madigan, who has served as speaker all but two years since 1983. She congers up the possiblity of term limits for Assembly leaders, loosening of House rules and closer cooperation with Republicans.

But you don't have to imagine what Madigan accomplished during his long reign as Speaker: negotiating budgets with both Democratic and Republican governors which cared for the needy, funded higher education for deserving low income students, paid state vendors, and improved state infrastructure. Once Bruce Rauner assumed the governorship two years ago, that spirt of compromise was shattered. Rauner held the budget and the people of Illinois hostage to implementing a budget with non-budgetary wish list items for the weatltyist Illinoisans that must remain the subject of the legislative, not the budgetary process. That form of political extortion which betrays the state's less fortunate was an unconscienable breach of poltical bi-partisanship and has rightly been resisted by Madigan and his Democratic caucus.

Unlike a General Assembly without Madigan, we don't have to imagine a General Assembly without Gov. Rauner. We know exactly what it would promptly do ...pass a budget.