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Hopes of a productive spring session already dashed

Posted February 15, 2008 10:00 pm

Doug Finke

Any thoughts that this year's spring session hopefully, just maybe, might be less nasty than last year's edition pretty much evaporated last week.

House Speaker MICHAEL MADIGAN, D-Chicago, wants to put some limits on Gov. ROD BLAGOJEVICH's powers. Explaining all of the details will just confuse things. The important point is that Madigan wants to put a clause into just about every House bill that curbs Blagojevich's power. Call it the Stick It to Blagojevich Clause.

Why should anyone care about something that deals with the arcane administrative rules-making process in the General Assembly? Just this. As you remember from all of your government classes in school, both the House and Senate have to approve the identical version of a bill.

So the House passes bills that include the Blagojevich clause. Senate President Emil Jones, D-Chicago, controls the Senate. He's a Blagojevich ally. It's a good bet he won't let the Senate approve any bill that has that clause in it. But the House won't approve anything that doesn't include it. That's what is known as an impasse.

House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego, is already predicting "the system is going to grind to a halt." Before you cheer that idea, remember that lawmakers do pass bills that benefit people and society. Last year, the fight was over the budget. Imagine that same fight now spreading to just about every bill in the legislature this year.

We're all of three days into new session, and it's already looking like last year all over again.

*We may never know for sure why an outside door in Blagojevich's suite of Capitol offices was open last week, allowing bitter cold air inside that froze a water pipe, causing it to break and flood part of the building.

One version is that howling winds blew the door open. That's fine, but it doesn't quite explain how the winds, strong as they were, could blow open the door. This is a door, albeit on a second-floor balcony, that leads into the governor's offices.

They don't keep the thing locked? Every other door leading into the governor's offices has an elaborate lock on it.

There are people around the Capitol who insist they've seen smokers on the balcony. It saves a trip all the way down to the ground-floor areas where everyone else smokes. Presumably, these are Blagojevich staffers, since anyone else would have to pass through the governor's security arrangements to get to the balcony.

It couldn't be possible that someone was out there smoking and didn't secure the door when they were done, allowing it to be blown open later? Nah, that couldn't happen.

Still, it's been a source of amusement to the Blagojevich bashers. First, the governor's people wreck state government. Now, they wreck state government's building, too.

*It didn't take Rep. BILL BLACK, R-Danville, even three days to have his first eruption of the season. It was more like three hours.

He was in unusually fine form when he found that he wouldn't be allowed to amend a bill he was sponsoring in committee. He'd have to wait a week to do that. That was it.

He launched into a tirade in the committee, slammed a chair against a table and vented further to reporters in a hallway. At various times he complained about dysfunctional Democrats ruining the system, about Madigan staffers one-third his age telling him what he can do, and other stuff. It sort of culminated when he referred to Rep. KAREN MAY, D-Highland Park, the committee chairman, as "an idiot."

That was Wednesday. A day later on the House floor, Black said his outburst was wrong, and he apologized to May. Shortly after that, Black erupted again when he was told he couldn't immediately respond to what he took as an insult from a Democratic lawmaker.

He's got to learn to relax.

*At the committee hearing, one thing Black said he was upset about was all the phone calls he was getting from anti-tobacco people asking him to vote against a bill that would allow smoking in private clubs. Black is sponsoring the bill.

That's some pretty savvy lobbying, asking a lawmaker to vote against his own bill.

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