The Cowardly Illinois Legislature Fails Again

Although more attention will be given to the Illinois legislature’s declining to legalize homosexual marriage in the state of Illinois, that wasn’t yesterday’s main legislative story. Despite promises to the contrary, despite Illinois’s having the lowest credit rating of any state, despite the likelihood of failing to deal with the state’s problems being very likely to push the state’s credit rating even lower and, consequently, increase the state’s costs, and despite Illinois’s problems in finding enough money to spend on its urgent priorities even without a higher cost of borrowing, the Illinois legislature did not muster the courage to face Illinois’s problems with its public pensions:

“The biggest supermajorities in modern history, the biggest issue facing the people of Illinois in a generation and you failed to deliver,” said Sen. Matt Murphy, a Palatine Republican. “… The governor is going to bring Squeezy out again tomorrow because you guys couldn’t figure out how to communicate with a supermajority of the same party on the other side of the building.”

Lawmakers spent the final days of session approving medical marijuana; a deal on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking;” a method for legalizing the carrying of concealed guns; and a historic expansion of Medicaid, a key part of President Barack Obama’s health care law.

They also sent Quinn a new $35.4 billion general revenue fund budget that avoids cuts to education for the first time in several years. But they had nothing to show for on pensions, legalizing gay marriage or expanding gambling.

The explanation for the failure to act is, first and foremost, that the Democratic supermajorities in control of the legislature are cowards, there is no pain-free solution to the problem so, consequently, they’re looking for someone else to blame.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the peculiarities of Illinois’s legislative process, from when the legislature convenes in January of each year until the end of May is considered “regular session”. During the regular session, bills are enacted by a simple majority of each house of the legislature. In the fall the legislature reconvenes for a two-week “veto session” during which the legislature considers the governor’s vetoes of its legislation including the peculiar “amendatory vetoes” (in which the governor actually re-writes portions of legislation) or other urgent legislation which can be passed during the veto session with less debate but must be passed by a two-thirds vote.

Illinois legislators frequently wait until the veto session to pass controversial laws. The effective result of doing that is to forgo passing legislation by a simple majority but over a three-day period in favor of a two-thirds majority in a single day.

Illinois has pension problems for two reasons. First, under the incompetent leadership of now-impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich, presently serving a term in prison, the state didn’t make its contributions to the various pension funds preferring instead to buy votes by expanding and liberalizing Medicaid, giving more benefits to the elderly, etc. They made the assumption that the state could always rely on rapidly rising revenues, something that hasn’t proven to be the case. Second, the state has overly-generous public pensions with funds that depend on wildly optimistic investment returns—8% per year compared with the closer to 1% realized last year.

I’m guessing that they’re calculating that they can hide behind Gov. Quinn (who, presumably, won’t be re-elected regardless of what he does) and/or blame the Republican majority minority for their ongoing failure to pass pension reform. Win-win!