May at Cap Fax

Here is May:

May 30 and beyond: My lease ended May 31st, the General Assembly adjourned with no real plan of when the Senate would pass pension borrowing, so the main course of the internship was over with. I spent the next couple months doing the Morning Shorts as the Blago Trial kicked off.

May 23-29: The GA came back to finish off the remaining legislative priorities. The big to-do was the Pension borrowing bill. This bill went up first in the House, and it was very contentious. Republican Bill Black pledged to vote for it, though no other Republican was willing to state so publicly. It needed to pass by a three-fifths vote, and Democrats are one vote shy of that threshold. On the first vote, Reps. David Miller and Jack Franks voted no from the Dems, and Reps. Black and Pritchard voted yes from the GOP, and it failed. Miller moved to reconsider, and it turned into a huge embarrassment for him, as he had no real excuse for his vote switch. Bob Biggins ended up voting in favor from Republicans after their caucus convinced Pritchard not to vote for it. It passed the House, and because two democrats were opposed in the Senate, President Cullerton never called it. I covered Brady’s presser after the chambers adjourned on Friday, and it was all done. Overall, it was quite an intense legislative session and I was very glad for it to be over with.

May 16-22: The General Assembly was off for another week, so once again my week consisted of doing the Morning Shorts and watching comments.

May 9-15: This week the General Assembly was off, but it was easily the best part of my entire internship. On Friday, after the Senate adjourned, GOP candidate Bill Brady held press availability where he took a range of questions about the budget. Brady’s major budget plan throughout the primary was to make “10% across-the-board cuts from every governmental agency,” but after getting whacked by former Gov. Jim Edgar for saying that, I noticed that he was trying to shy away from it and say he just wanted to cut “10% of the budget.” When he told a reporter that he could cut the budget without cutting personnel, I followed up and asked him how he could cut 10% across-the-board without cutting personnel. He told me that he “never said across-the-board.” I said “Yes, you have,” and he said “Well, you find it on tape.” So I did. And on Monday I posted a story to the blog with the video of Brady denying he had ever said ‘across-the-board’ to me, and also included video of him earlier on in the campaign saying he has called for “10% across the board cuts.” This came at exactly the time Brady was start getting coverage in Chicago and the suburbs, and it was the first question Carol Marin asked him on Chicago Tonight. He hemmed and hawed and said it was just a “matter of semantics.” The story got picked up by AP, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Quinn campaign. On Tuesday, Rich made a post pointing out how the Mainstream Media failed to attribute any of this to my original story on the blog. After that my week consisted of just doing the Morning Shorts and watching comments.

May 2-8: For a couple weeks prior, Speaker Madigan had been saying the General Assembly would be out by May 7th. Despite the fact that a lot of very important legislation had yet to be taken care of, the Speaker and the Senate President geared up to get out by May 7th anyway, which made this a hugely busy and “productive” week, with major legislation passing in just one or two days. While some bills, like the Democrats amendment for redistricting, broke sharply along well-expected party lines, the School Voucher bill was a much more unpredictable bill. Because the bill endorses a Republican school reform idea—school vouchers—yet will be used to help the worst-performing 10% of Chicago Public Schools, and was sponsored originally by Rev. and Sen. James Meeks, it cut across party lines, racial lines, and geographic lines. Furthermore, Bill Brady was really trying to rally Republican support so it could put Pat Quinn in an uncomfortable position if it came across his desk. While it had narrowly passed in the Senate weeks earlier, it ultimately fell short after some incredibly intense debate in the House. Nonetheless, other bills sailed on by. The Telecom Reform Act, which essentially was a deregulation bill that gave AT&T more business, passed unanimously in both chambers. McPier reform passed. The budget passed. And the General Assembly adjourned without creating any new sources of revenue, be it a cigarette tax increase or even tax amnesty.

April 25-May 1: This week Deb Mell announced her engagement to her partner on the House floor. Several members of the legislature spoke in support, though all were Democrats except for one Republican. The House Judiciary Committee also followed up on their Constitutional Remap proposal which passed the Senate. They also went over the Fair Map Amendment which was put before them by Tom Cross. I filmed the whole thing, and it got heated at some points, particularly when the League of Women’s Voters Chris Butler said he took strong offense to Democrats “parading as defenders of minority rights.” As expected, the House committee held the Fair Map proposal, a measure financially-supported by Republicans, in committee and moved the Democratic-sponsored amendment forward to the floor. On Thursday, I covered a protest by the Civic Action Network that took place at a lobbyist’s office. It was very intense. The group arrived by bus and included Catholic ministers and community members. They were protesting the poor nursing home care received by people of color in Chicago and Illinois. One of the lobby firms leaders arrived and there was a very heated exchange, and the protesters sang spiritual songs on the sidewalk until the police arrived. Usually they just protest on the steps of the Capitol, but this time they took it to the lobbyists’ office. On Friday, the House debated the Democrats constitutional amendment for revising redistricting methods. The proposal failed to meet the required constitutional three-fifths majority by just 2 votes, as was expected. Sen. Kwame Raoul was very disgusted by it when I interviewed him the next day.