Rep. Breen misrepresents good governance and law in confusing voters on budget crisis

In his latest constituent email, my state rep Peter Breen (R-48), not only misrepresents his role in the Illinois budget impasse, but also a legal concept unbecoming a high profile lawyer.

Let’s start with budget crisis misrepresentation. Breen entered the House when Gov. Rauner entered the Governor’s mansion, and immediately signed on to Rauner’s turnaround agenda. It was an unprecedented and cruel tactic to strangle Illinois payments to state vendors, state universities and the needy by not passing a budget till the legislature capitulated to non budgetary items like term limits, union givebacks and property tax freezes unrelated to a statutorily required balanced budget. Rauner, with Breen’s support, presented 44 such items, and refused to approve a budget for over two years, turning a bad but improving financial situation into a disaster. Rauner’s predecessor had reduced the vendor payment backlog, paid pension obligations and kept the educational and social safety net functioning for students and persons in need. Rauner actually boasted about exploiting the worsening financial crisis he created to get his non budgetary wish list. After two years the legislature finally passed a budget, with Republican votes, reversing the financial catastrophe imposed upon the less fortunate. Breen’s enabling and cheerleading Rauner’s unprecedented, heartless refusal to provide a budget is bad governance which must be called out.

Then there is Breen’s misrepresenting the law. To explain away the 16 Republicans who had to decency and sense to pull Illinois back from the financial precipice, Breen uses the bizarre concept they were blackmailed, calling the GOP supported deal ‘budget blackmail’. Even most non lawyers know that blackmail is the criminal offence of demanding money from a person in return for not revealing compromising or injurious information about that person. Possibly the only voter in the 48th who believes the 16 principled GOP legislators were blackmailed is Peter Breen. On second thought Breen knows full well they weren’t blackmailed. Unlike Peter Breen they were, in the words of one of them ' I'm not working for Governor Rauner… I’m working for the people.’ That, Rep. Breen, is not blackmail. It’s simply good governance.