April at Cap Fax

Here is April:

April 18-24: This week’s highly-anticipated event was a major rally by Teachers Unions and Public Employees at the Capitol on Wednesday for a big Save Our State Rally (S.O.S.). Press releases claimed that there would be 15,000 people there, and some reports claimed there might be violence. Early on union protesters started filling up Capitol Avenue and Second Street, and the crowd was quite large. However, most people didn’t think a full 15,000 showed up, and reports suggested it was more likely between 7,000 and 15,000 people. Also, the protesters were quite civil. No one was arrested, and the whole rally was extremely well-organized. The leaders of the major unions—IEA, IFT, AFSCME, and SEIU—all gave speeches denouncing the legislative inaction of the state on paying backlogged bills and increasing revenue. Afterwards, the groups marched around the block and then headed inside the Capitol building and chanted loudly in the Capitol rotunda. Despite the large-scale event and how organized it was, many media people reported it to not be very effective. Normally on big lobby days people will meet with legislators and actually go into their offices. Since the protesters stayed inside the rotunda and left afterwards, they didn’t get to meet directly with many of the lawmakers. Not much else happened until late Friday afternoon when Brady released his income tax returns for 3 hours to reporters in Springfield. I was there covering it, and many members of the press corps were furious that the campaign was not allowing reporters to make copies of the returns—only take notes. The story got buried for the most part since Alexi Giannoulias’s Bank was seized in Chicago that day, but the big story that broke that day and continued throughout that campaign was the fact that Brady paid no state or federal income taxes in 2008 and no federal income taxes in 2009 due to losses in capital gains. While Brady broke no rules by having no tax liability, he still got hammered by Quinn and the media, who believe he should pay taxes on his state senator salary no matter what.

April 11-17: It was a shortened week--the General Assembly was only in session Tuesday through Thursday. On Tax Day, April 15, GOP Gubernatorial nominee Bill Brady help a press conference where he launched his "Stop The Pat Quinn Tax Campaign." He took questions on a range of subjects that we videotaped to post to the blog. I asked what his response was to former Gov. Jim Edgar's criticisms of his budget proposal and 10% across-the-board cuts. Overall the biggest issue this week was definitely redistricting. On Monday the Senate Committee on Constitutional Redistricting Amendments (I think) heard over 4 hours of testimony and questions on the various redistricting proposals. Senate minority leader Christine Radogno proposed a constitutional amendment that mirrors the "Fair Map Amendment" proposal currently being worked on by the League of Women Voters. Sen. Kwame Raoul also had a proposal to amend the constitution to reform redistricting, with its greatest change to be the denesting of representative and senate districts. There is a great deal of minutiae to explain about the different merits of each proposal, but ultimately the democratic plan passed out of committee and passed the Senate on Tuesday. In order to pass the House it would need to gain at least one Republican supporter, as the House dems are one short of a supermajority, but that will be difficult as these proposals have very strictly partisan support.

April 4-10: The General Assembly had a two week Spring Break, so our work was focused on a project to analyze the vote totals of state representative elections over the past decade. Basically we added up the vote totals of each party in the primary and general elections of the 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 cycles. The goal was to use this data to show which party had higher turnout in elections and to quantify the margin. I did find the data limited in its value personally, as many of primary and general elections go uncontested, and thus the vote totals are skewed to the party that has the most candidates in contention. The final results showed that more Democrats vote in the house rep races total, but Democrats have also held a strong majority in most election years anyway, and thus the data is not the best representation of party turnout based on total votes.

March 28-April 3: Perhaps the biggest event that we covered in this time period happened on the Saturday the day before, when we covered the Democrats lt. gov. nomination process. Because of Scott Lee Cohen's withdrawal as the Democratic nominee for lt. governor, the Democratic State Central Committee had to select a new candidate to replace him on the ballot. This event was particularly charged as supporters for Art Turner, who was runner-up to Cohen, Sheila Simon, who Pat Quinn endorsed for the replacement, and Raja Krishnamoorthi all showed up with signs and loud voices of support. The committee ended up giving great deference to Pat Quinn's selection as Sheila Simon ended up capturing the nomination. We videotaped the finalists' speeches, interviewed the frontrunners, and posted it all to the blog. The week did not have very much activity otherwise, as this was the first week of the General Assembly being on spring vacation.