Rauner Is Still Pushing His Agenda, Even With The Stopgap Budget Expiring

By aaroncynic in News on Aug 30, 2016 7:28PM

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner at the Illinois State Fair. Photo by Aaron Cynic.

Shortly after Illinois legislators return to Springfield after the November election, the stopgap budget will expire and Illinois will be right back in the same jam it experienced a few short months ago.

But rather than a permanent budget solution, it appears that Gov. Bruce Rauner's top priority is the same package of reforms he demanded lawmakers pass prior to a fully funded budget—a move which resulted in stalemate for a full fiscal year.

“The first thing we need to do is change our political system,” Rauner told Fox 55 Springfield’s Jordan Abudayyeh, in an interview on Monday. Abudayyeh asked him whether redistricting reform, which took a blow last week when a ballot initiative was shot down by the State Supreme Court, was back at the top of his priorities list again. “The answer is yes,” said the Governor. “We have a broken system in many ways. Our economy is broken, we’re not competitive, we’re losing our jobs. Our families have lower incomes as a result. The property tax system is broken. We have the highest in America, we need to reform that. Our pension system is unaffordable and going to be crushing our budget and taking money from our schools and social services.”

“We’re not holding our politicians accountable. Our people in Illinois really don’t have a voice,” Rauner added.

The proposed referendum, dubbed the “fair maps” amendment, would’ve changed the way legislative districts are drawn. If passed, an 11-person board of commissioners would’ve drawn the boundaries, rather than the General Assembly. On Friday, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled against it in a 4-3 decision.

Former Gov. Pat Quinn proposed his own version of a redistricting effort on Tuesday, saying in a press release that the language in the proposal was “fatally flawed.” Quinn’s proposal, which he called “simpler, cleaner and pristine” in a press conference at the Thompson Center Tuesday afternoon, also creates an 11-member commission, but one appointed by the Supreme Court. The other proposal would’ve had an auditor general select a three-member panel, which would’ve selected seven individuals from a pool, with the other members selected by the Speaker, Senate President and legislative minority leaders.

But while redistricting legislative districts so gerrymandered that President Barack Obama once said they “look like earmuffs or spaghetti” is something the state sorely needs, it also needs a fully funded budget that doesn’t leave thousands of Illinoisans without some basic services. The summer stopgap agreement was merely a band-aid on a major wound, activists argued at the time.

In his rounds with the press Tuesday morning, however, Rauner seemed less than interested in keeping those services on anything more than the most basic of life support. In an interview with ABC7, Judy Hsu presented the governor with a “heat map” created by Illinois Partners for Human Service, which shows how much money providers have lost due to the budget impasse. When asked if he “had a real grasp” of what poor and underserved families face, Rauner responded:

“We always try to spend much more than we really bring in. That makes us the state that people leave the most from...We’ve got to have financial discipline, and we need reforms to grow our economy. That’s the number one priority.”

However, for a full year Rauner said he wouldn’t consider an attempt at raising revenue for the state unless lawmakers passed varying parts of his reform packages, a move that further sank the state into an already too-deep fiscal chasm. NBC5's Zoraida Sambolin asked him how he sleeps at night, to which Rauner replied with familiar rhetoric.

After election day, the Illinois budget impasse could be right back where it started.