Illinois is America's biggest basket case: Over $150 billion in unfunded retirement liabilities. The worst overall fiscal condition of any state. Two governors and a raft of other public officials sent to prison. Corruption that costs every citizen more than $1,300 a year.
Job growth that trails all surrounding states. The slow-motion liquidation of Downstate's manufacturing economy. Over 300,000 more people fleeing the state just since 2010.
“Bruce Rauner... was elected governor as a Republican in 2014 on his second attempt, with a promise to shake up Springfield and start fundamentally reforming the state.”
The venal and bankrupt political class of both parties created this toxic mess. Those who benefited served as enablers, including public employees, unions and the big business interests who always seemed to cut a better side deal of subsidies for themselves.
Enter Bruce Rauner. An independently wealthy financier, he was elected governor as a Republican in 2014 on his second attempt, with a promise to shake up Springfield and start fundamentally reforming the state.
He's certainly delivered on the first part of that pledge. Rauner put forward a blizzard of reform proposals, including tort reform, workers' comp and unemployment insurance changes, and half a dozen constitutional amendments, including for legislative term limits.
While Rauner and everybody else knows that higher taxes are required to pay off Illinois' Mount Everest of debt, he has refused to countenance more taxes without reform first — reform that Democrats oppose.
This has created a budget stalemate dragging on for months, even though the Democrats have a supermajority in the Illinois General Assembly and can override any Rauner vetoes to pass anything they want.
While most state spending remains on autopilot, this standoff is causing pain.
Local governments have seen their bonds downgraded. Chicago's tourism agency had to lay off staff. State universities aren't receiving government funding. Social service agencies are being squeezed.
One would think this would pressure the state's legacy Democratic leadership, which presided over creating much of the current mess, to get on board with reform.
Michael Madigan has all but ruled the state with an iron fist since becoming speaker of the Illinois House in 1983. Virtually every bad decision since happened with his approval. Some people now dub the state Madiganistan.
Likewise, Senate President John Cullerton has been in the legislature since 1979 and in charge of the Senate since 2009.
But in some bizarre inversion, Rauner is the one under pressure to fold and return to business-as-usual politics in Illinois. Even some of the governor's own putative allies are turning up the heat. These include legacy Republicans such as former Gov. Jim Edgar, one of the key architects of the state's current pension mess, and some weak-kneed business leaders.
But it's mostly the usual suspects such as the unions and their allies. This includes the New York Times, which just ran a major hit piece on Rauner claiming he's the front man for a cabal of wealthy financiers out to hurt the state's citizens to further their own ideological interests.
“The [New York] Times says Rauner's "vision has unsettled many in the state." Yes, he most certainly has upset the crooks, cronies, criminals and unions who have been bleeding the Illinois public dry for decades.”
The Times, however, couldn't find room in its 3,000-word extravaganza to even mention Madigan or Cullerton, speaking volumes about its true agenda. Instead, it focuses on Rauner's union reform proposals.
Make no mistake: The unions and public employees were the top beneficiaries of the Illinois train wreck. Illinois can't be fixed without curtailing their clout. It's a testament to how much power unions have in Illinois that it was considered a great victory for reform when exhibitors at McCormick Place no longer had to pay a union electrician to plug in their printers.
This is a state where the previous governor walked union picket lines, where over 11,000 public retirees collect tax-free, six-figure pensions as high as $450,000 per year, and where union lobbyists managed to get a full public pension worth as much as a $1 million by doing one day of substitute teaching.
Union clout is also obstructing reform of the scandal-wracked Chicago Police Department. For example, state law forced the city to pay more than $20 million to defend fired cop Jon Burge, even in civil suits over his torturing of black suspects into falsely confessing to murder by using an electric cattle prod on their testicles. Burge is still collecting his pension.
The Fraternal Order of Police sued this year to force the city to destroy police misconduct files, claiming their contract requires it. What in the world is the New York Times thinking?
Madigan, Cullerton and other Democrats actually want to give unions even more power. They passed a law forcing 26,000 part-time home health care workers — hired by the patient, often a relative, and without state benefits or civil service protection — to join and pay dues to the SEIU union. The U.S. Supreme Court struck that down.
“The choice isn't between Rauner and some imaginary progressive utopia. It's between Rauner's reforms and more Madigan misrule.”
Just this year, they tried to mandate binding arbitration for public union disputes in a state already in fiscal extremis.
The Times says Rauner's "vision has unsettled many in the state.
Yes, he most certainly has upset the crooks, cronies, criminals and unions who have been bleeding the Illinois public dry for decades.
Some, especially on the left, may strongly dislike Rauner's proposals, but he's the only chance at reform Illinois has.
He's the only reformer who managed the feat of getting elected.
The choice isn't between Rauner and some imaginary progressive utopia. It's between Rauner's reforms and more Madigan misrule.
That's an easy choice to make.
Illinois can't afford any more Madigan-Cullerton style business as usual.
This piece originally appeared in Investor's Business Daily