(grand suspenseful music) - Welcome to another edition of Capitol View.

I'm Jak Tichenor, sitting in for Jennifer Fuller this week.

Our guests are Dave McKinney of WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and Peter Hancock of Capitol News Illinois.

Gentlemen, good to have you on the program.

Lots to unpack here this week at both the state and the federal levels.

Let's start at the federal level.

The Governor and Lieutenant Governor were in Washington this week, talking on different issues.

Let's start with Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton.

She was one of the panelists testifying before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on access to abortion this week.

She told the panel that Illinois is now an island for reproductive rights, and Illinois needs federal support to deal with the expected numbers of women coming to Illinois seeking abortions and other healthcare.

You know, we've talked in the past about how Illinois's status as one of the only states in the Midwest still protecting access to abortion.

How does the Lieutenant Governor's appearance there perhaps elevate or change that in your view?

Dave, you wanna start off?

- Well, I mean, I think she's throwing down a marker on the state's behalf and putting it on record.

It's obvious to anybody on either side of the abortion movement that there are states just like Illinois that are the points at which many, many, many young women and girls are coming to for abortions.

And, you know, I don't think that the Lieutenant Governor of the state of Illinois, as persuasive of a figure as she can be, you know, is really gonna move the needle very much at the legislative level in Washington on this.

Congress doesn't appear at all interested in legislating on this.

I mean, there will be some effort here in Illinois to deal with that.

We know that, you know, even after the ruling came down, the Governor said that there was gonna be a special session here.

And of course, that got put off after the Highland Park shooting.

And it's gonna be, you know, coming up here in a matter of months.

But I mean, I think there will be more action taken, as she pointed out in her testimony, to protect, you know, women and girls who come here from out of state from legal repercussions, as well as the clinics themselves and the doctors and staff that work at them, and fortifying them in some way, because they're certainly all gonna become targets of the antiabortion movement.

- Peter.

- Yeah, I thought one of the interesting things that she said, clinics and hospitals have generally a geographic area, a catchment area from which they draw patients.

Abortion clinics in Illinois are now drawing patients from as far away as Louisiana and Texas and Florida.

So as Dave was saying, I mean, Illinois is going to be a reproductive healthcare provider to a much larger territory.

And so that's why she and the governor are pushing for additional federal aid.

We will note that Planned Parenthood of Illinois and Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin are announcing kind of a partnership to make sure that people in Wisconsin will be able to get abortion services.

So, yeah, Illinois is an outlier in the Midwest right now, and it's gonna put a lot of strain on the healthcare here.

- As you pointed out, Peter, she asked the Biden administration for more money moving forward to support the demand of additional women coming to the state for reproductive healthcare services and to create kind of a centralized hub for providers and patients that would more or less ease the burden on the current providers.

- Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what that centralized hub is going to look like.

I think that needs to be fleshed out a little bit, but as David was pointing out, we are probably going to have a special session before the fall veto session, probably before the election, in which the state will deal with abortion rights, as well as gun issues, I'm afraid.

- Along those lines, David, you indicated that it may be several more weeks or maybe a month or more to get that special session together.

I know they were having some problems pulling all the lawmakers together, particularly in the House.

It's always kind of a challenge to do that, particularly in the summer months, especially when it's an election year.

I think there was also some concern on the parts of some of the players like Planned Parenthood, that they wanted to make sure that they got all of the things that they wanted and get it all tied off before they came back to Springfield, not to do a rush job.

But would that be your view?

- Yeah, most certainly.

I mean, I think that the Planned Parenthood people, the abortion rights people, ACLU, they all are working in tandem to try to pull something together here, pull a package together on top of the very favorable abortion rights climate that exists here.

So, I mean, that's definitely happening, but you know, there's also a political dynamic at play here that people are not as tuned into news in general, I don't think, during the summer.

And with an election coming in November, I think that there probably are strategic reasons that Democrats would like to, you know, stage all of this a little closer to the election because, you know, right after Stratton's testimony, the Pritzker campaign debuted a new ad that featured her and her daughters and talking about the importance of abortion rights.

And on the flip side, you have Darren Bailey who is an ardent foe of abortion.

But I get a sense that, you know, in his case, he's trying to, you know, I think, I don't know that a real heated argument on abortion helps him in a general election, because I think the majority of the electorate in Illinois favors abortion rights.

And he's probably out of step with that a little bit.

So I think, you know, there are a lot of political dynamics at play here about timing and making sure voters are aware that this matters.

Suburban women are such a key constituency to the election, to Democrats in general.

And, you know, they above all, I think, are the people that the Democrats are aiming to reach here.

- Peter, what do you think?

- Well, you know, I also think there's another factor out there that probably gives them an incentive to put this issue off until just before the election.

And that is that inflation is now running at 9.1%.

That is going to be devastating to Democratic candidates on the ballot, especially people running for Congress.

So their ability to change the conversation and focus on something other than inflation and the price of gasoline and the economy plays to their favor.

- I was just watching a new CNN poll on that.

And all the issues that you were talking about, inflation is at the top of it and abortion is down at the bottom of that list of concerns.

I wanna turn now to the issue of gun violence.

Governor Pritzker and Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering were in Washington this week for the signing of the Safer Communities Act.

President Biden had praise for both of them in their response to the Highland Park shooting on July 4th.

Pritzker says he supports more changes to Illinois's red flag law, but will those changes make a difference when it comes down to preventing further Highland Park shooting tragedies?

- Well, I think the real issue, obviously there are some weaknesses to the red flag law, and I'm not sure how much more you can strengthen it.

I think the real issue that they're going to be focusing on is an assault weapons ban, and Pritzker talked about this in Washington, the president talked about it.

And, you know, the idea that people, civilians can walk around with weapons that are more powerful than those used by law enforcement, I think that's the issue they're gonna be focusing on.

- With respect to that and a ban on assault rifles, how would that square with federal law?

Because Congress doesn't seem to have any appetite for going after that at all.

- Well, yeah, I don't think there's gonna be any kind of, probably no movement on that in Washington.

You know, it'll put Illinois in a spot that, you know, there are other states that ban the sale of AR-15s and the ammunition magazines that go along with it.

You know, to your original question, Jak, about, will all of this have any impact?

I think you can legislate and legislate and legislate in making these things unavailable but the fact is, you know, there are so many of these weapons already in circulation.

And as we see in Chicago, you know, you don't find gun shops in Chicago and yet many of the guns that are used to commit crimes there wind up being traced either to suburban gun shops or to gun shops in Indiana and outside of Illinois.

So, I mean, you know, you can try to build a wall around Illinois with these new gun restrictions, and clearly something needs to be done here because you know, the idea that you can walk into, as we've seen, people walking into supermarkets and schools and parades with these weapons and inflicting absolute war-like terror on people, something needs to happen.

But it's hard to imagine like, how anything that anybody does in Washington or Springfield is gonna stop this and that's the most vexing part of the whole problem.

- Peter?

- Yeah, to Dave's point, I think we now have more guns in the United States than we have people.

And so, there are so many guns out there in circulation.

It is going to be very hard to clamp down on it.

And as you said, you know, there's not that much of an appetite for it in Congress right now with the 50/50 Senate and a very slim Democratic majority in the House.

And so it's gonna have to be decided at the ballot box, I think.

And that's another reason why I think Democrats in Illinois wanna make the conversation about this as close to the election as they can, rather than inflation and the economy.

- And speaking of the ballot box, that's a nice segue over to the next topic.

You know, despite the fact he's been playing down any presidential aspirations on his part, there appears to be something of a groundswell of support for Governor JB Pritzker running for the White House.

It's early to talk about this, or, well, is it too early to be talking about this?

Clearly, he's still gotta get through the gubernatorial election in November.

- Well, Governor Pritzker has said he will not run for president if Joe Biden is running for reelection.

So that's the big question, and Joe Biden is not going to come out now and say he's not running for reelection because that'd essentially be the end of his term in office.

He still has a lot of things on his agenda that he wants to accomplish.

And if he were to announce that right now, then that would be the end of it.

And all the attention would be focused on who's going to succeed him.

So I don't think we're gonna hear anything from President Biden for at least a year or so.

And in the meantime we have, you know, Democrats like JB Pritzker who are kind of quietly maneuvering for position, as kind of a just in case sort of scenario.

- Yeah, and I mean, I think the news peg for this obviously is the July 16th appearance, where Pritzker is a keynote speaker in front of Florida Democrats, you know?

And he, of course, earlier had gone to New Hampshire to speak to Democrats there.

And those do seem to be like, you know, early moves that aspiring presidential candidates make.

You know, he's been very careful to, as Peter says, to make clear that he's not interested in running against Biden, he and Biden are friends.

And so I think that statement is iron clad up to the point that Joe Biden is president and seeks reelection.

But that statement has all sorts of wiggle room to it as well.

You know, obviously, he has the resources as a billionaire to run a pretty robust presidential campaign, should he choose to.

He would be up against people like Gavin Newsom, the California governor potentially, or the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

And those are just to name a few.

I mean, if Biden did not seek reelection, it would be a wide open field.

Similar, I think, to what we saw with Republicans in 2016, where there were just scads of them coming out the woodwork.

And so, you know, Pritzker has really upped his profile in taking on Trump, being out front nationally on the Supreme Court's Roe versus Wade decision, the Highland Park mass shooting has elevated his prominence.

And then plus, who would've ever thought that we would reach a stage where Illinois would actually have a compelling story that might sell nationally in the country.

Because like, you know, we have, our finances here have stabilized.

You know, he has managed to kind of keep the Democratic constituencies in Illinois, the progressives, the moderates, the LGBTQ, the African Americans.

I mean, he's kept the core constituencies pretty much together.

And so he's got a record he thinks that he can run on, starting with financial stability and abortion rights and gun control.

And so it'll be interesting to see how or if he makes the next move.

- It was interesting, Dave, you pointed out, and Peter, that Pritzker's going to Florida here in coming days.

That's already drawn the ire of his Republican opponent.

Senator Darren Bailey's basically saying, hey, you need to be here calling special sessions on gas prices and everything else and public safety.

What are you doing running down to Florida?

- Well, I mean, it's a good counter argument, I think, for Bailey to make.

I mean, Bailey is in a position where he's gotta take advantage of as much free media as he can, and poking the governor on stuff like this is probably a smart political play to do.

But, on the flip side, you know, Darren Bailey, it was not that long ago, I think it was in May where he himself made a trip to Mar-a-lago, the state of Florida to curry favor with Donald Trump.

So, you know, it's not unusual for people to be making trips to Florida for political reasons.

- A spokeswoman for Pritzker's campaign says this weekend's speech in Florida is a Democratic fundraiser and it's all about the midterm elections.

And that would, in some way I think, lean toward trying to bloody up the Republicans in what up until now has been seen as an election in the midterms where there will be a lot of strong Republican headwinds for Democratic candidates.

- Yeah.

I mean, there are a number of races in Florida.

I mean, they've got a governor's race and of course, DeSantis is sort of kind of the ground zero conversation starter about the 2024 presidential election himself.

And, you know, there are all sorts of interesting sub plots to the thing.

I mean, you think about Pritzker's nemesis, Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund operator out of Chicago.

He picks up his operation and his family and moves to Florida and just, it's kind of interesting.

If you could put those two together in a room in Tampa and watch 'em duke it out, you know?

- [Jak] And Bruce Rauner's down there too.

- Bruce Rauner's down there as well.

- Peter, I wanna, go ahead.

- No, I was just gonna say Ron DeSantis must be very happy that all these Illinois billionaire Republicans are moving down to his state.

We'll see whether or not he benefits from it.

- Peter, I do wanna turn to one of your bureau stories this week's on Pritzker's announcement.

First of all, that we have a new IDPH director in the Department of Public Health, Dr. Sameer Vohra, who is a pediatrician and professor at the SIU School of Medicine.

His appointment comes on the heels of Dr. Ngozi Ezike's departure a bit earlier in the year.

Those are some big shoes to fill, particularly after Dr. Ezike's performance over the long haul during the first two and a half, three years of the COVID pandemic.

- Yeah, it is kind of interesting.

I mean, this man has a medical degree, a law degree, and a public policy degree.

We were joking in the office that he must have just been a glutton for punishment when he was in college, because those are three really impressive degrees.

And he does have some big shoes to fill, you know, during 2000 when the pandemic first hit, Dr. Ezike and Governor Pritzker had, I think, somewhere around 180 daily news conferences.

I mean, she was basically the face and the voice of the medical community in Illinois and the public health community.

But we're now seeing, we're hoping, at least, that we're on the far side of the pandemic, things are tapering off, and we've also seen Governor Pritzker ever so gradually rolling back a lot of the mandates that he put in place during the pandemic, certain testing and vaccine mandates, things like that.

He's hoping to kind of unwind this thing gradually, hoping against hope that we don't have another surge this fall and winter.

- And that's concerning point that you just made, Peter, because we're hearing now that the BA.5 variant is extremely contagious and it's already starting to make its inroads into the population at large.

- Yeah, there's probably gonna have to be a campaign to increase vaccination rates and get people in for boosters, maybe even their second booster or third booster.

This may be a disease sort of like the flu where you have to tweak the vaccine every season or so because these new variants are coming along.

- [Jak] Dave, what do you think?

- Well, yeah, I mean, I think he's gonna have a new, he's really kind of landing in the frying pan really because what's concerning about this latest surge is the fact that, you know, hospitalizations seem to be creeping up slightly.

And, you know, that's really kind of the barometer here we have to use about how bad this is, because, you know, with so many people now relying upon home tests, we're not getting as accurate of a reading on the spread of this as we were in the early days of the pandemic.

So, you know, public health authorities are watching this very, very closely, and it wouldn't surprise me if we, you know, if we take another step in the next week or two going farther down.

You know, I think Pritzker and the new public health director are gonna be having to be front and center, maybe not to the extent that they were before, but certainly, you know, offering more public, as Peter says, more public health guidance to people about getting those vaccines and, you know, I know mask wearing is such a politically divisive issue, but, we may be edging ever closer back to that again if things continue.

- Oh, you make a good point.

Because in my hometown of Carbondale, I'm starting to see the mask mandates, at least in the stores, come back up in the windows before you walk in, they highly recommend that you wear those, in addition to the staff in the stores.

Other topics I wanna get to before we wrap up.

A little earlier, former Congressman Dan Lipinski was toying with another run, perhaps this time as an Independent.

Now he says he's not running, but saying that he's eyeing a new initiative to support independent candidates.

And he says he's reaching out to representative Adam Kinzinger about that.

Is there room for an independent party in Illinois?

I mean, a few years back, the Greens had a good run at that.

They actually had a candidate for governor on the ballot having wrapped up over 10% of the vote.

- You know, eight years ago, I covered a US Senate campaign in Kansas where an entrenched incumbent Republican, Pat Roberts, was on the ropes, and an independent candidate, wealthy businessman named Greg Orman, drew a lot of national attention by running against him.

Greg Orman lost by nine points, even though he had been up in the polls before, because Republicans were able to pull in, on election day or election week, a massive get out the vote machine.

They had caravans of vehicles that would drive people to the polls.

30 years ago this year, Ross Perot tried to launch the Reform Party, ran for president twice.

50 years ago, George Wallace ran for president on what was called the American Party.

So this emerging independent movement that Dan Lipinski seems to refer to has been emerging most of my life, and it doesn't seem to be moving very far.

In a lot of cases, these independent movements tend to be more about individual candidates than they are about voters who are feeling disaffected by the two parties.

You know, in each of these cases, it was the same message.

They talked about how neither of the two parties is representing, you know, middle America or what Nixon used to refer to as the silent majority.

But then these independent movements just don't go anywhere because they don't have the organizational strength.

They don't have, you know, political professionals in the background who do that kind of work year round.

So he can talk about an independent movement, I just don't, I'm skeptical about it.

I don't see it happening.

- Dave, your thoughts before we wrap up.

- I mean really quickly here, both Lipinski and Kinzinger are kind of case studies in how their respective parties have kind of, in a way, abandoned them because you know, Lipinski was an anti-abortion Democrat, and Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican.

And so the parties have been moving farther and farther to their extreme flanks, and people like Lipinski and Kinzinger no longer have homes.

So I can understand why Lipinski would want a place for independents to go, but, you know, until the resources are there and the votes are there, it's kind of a pie in the sky kind of idea, I think.

- Yeah, and to your point, I think the question is, how can you be most effective?

Working within the parties to try and pull them back to the center or trying to launch a third party?

Third party movements in the United States just have not gained traction.

And, you know, I think they would be better off working within the Republican and Democratic parties to try and pull 'em back toward the middle.

- And Peter, you have the last word, thank you so much.

Our thanks to Dave McKinney from WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and Peter Hancock of Capitol News Illinois for taking part in this week's Capitol View.

Gentlemen, thanks so much, take care.

(grand music)