- Welcome to "Capitol View", where we discuss the latest in state government and politics.

Joining us this week is Peter Hancock, a reporter for Capitol News Illinois.

Thanks for being here, Peter.

- Hi Hannah, good to see you.

- And also here is John Jackson, visiting professor of political science at Southern Illinois University's Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.

Thanks for being here, John.

- I'm glad to be here today.

- Well, god, another busy week in state politics.

Of course, finally, finally, after, you know, months, but truly years of debate over the issue, the house, as we discussed last week, passed the long awaited climate and energy bill that will get Illinois on a path to a 100% renewable energy in the next three decades.

And then the Senate came back to Springfield Monday to pass it and yesterday on Wednesday, the governor finally signed it.

So Peter, just bring us through the broad strokes of this bill, a hundred percent renewable energy by 2045, but that's not everything in this.

- Well, and to be precise, it's a hundred percent carbon-free energy.

Nuclear power will still make up a very large percentage of the overall mix, but essentially, and that's the crux of the bill is that it bails out three of Exelon corporation's nuclear power plants over the next five years with something close to $700 million in subsidies.

If they had just done that though, I don't think that bill would have passed on its own.

So it contains a lot more incentives to develop wind and solar energy.

It contains a lot of workforce training to help people transition, people who are going to lose their jobs in coal and natural gas plants, help them transition to a renewable energy industry.

So it contains a lot of things like that.

It targets certain communities that have been the most adversely impacted by pollution, especially from coal plants.

So it contains a lot of these workforce equity provisions, as well as bailing out the nuclear power plants, which was really the big deal, because the first of those, the Byron energy plant, I believe it needed to be refueled on Monday.

And Exelon was saying, if they didn't get a legislative package, they weren't going to refuel it.

And they were on a path to just shutting that down.

And the one in Dresden would've followed within a month or two after that, and there were a lot of jobs there, that's a lot of domestic energy production in Illinois, they would've had to replace it with purchasing power from coal fired plants out of state.

So it really is a monumental piece of legislation.

And I think it's something that governor Pritzker will be running on in his reelection campaign.

- We'll get to the political ramifications in a few minutes, but a major part of the debate over this.

It's an emotional issue to tell folks, especially who have been working at coal fired power plants, who, you know, whose livelihoods, whose towns have, economies have depended on that for decades.

You know, say that actually this way of life is going away.

Now a lot of coal-fired power plants for the most part in Illinois, we're already voluntarily shutting down.

There's a company called Vistra, which owns a handful of these power plants that their long-term plan has been to move those plants to a solar battery storage, which is a unique and innovative way to use those facilities and not just let them stay stagnant, but the crux, what really held up the bill all summer was the fate of two municipally owned coal fired power plants, one in Springfield and one in Marissa in the Metro east.

And that one has a whole host of contracts with towns and cities across Illinois and beyond that they're on the hook for paying the bonds that built the plant and on the hook for buying energy from the plant.

So, but John, in Southern Illinois, coal has been a huge part of the economy for a century.

And it's a really emotional issue to tell people, you know, I'm sorry your way of life is actually polluting the planet and it's, you know, morally wrong.

You saw that in the floor debate so many times, this constant theme of Illinois politics is that downstate Illinois, especially Southern Illinois, Western Illinois is just ignored.

So do you think that there are ramifications to this kind of, we heard the term virtue signaling on the floor from Republicans a lot, or do you think that by and large people do accept that coal is going away?

- Well, as you indicate coal is huge in Southern Illinois, but it's not nearly as big as it used to be.

Particularly from an economic standpoint, the Prairie state thing is terribly important.

Those union jobs are terribly important that resonates in Southern Illinois.

But I would say it's really more of a cultural thing now than it is economic.

The economy has changed.

The source of energies has changed.

And when I moved here, there were thousands of UMW members there way fewer than that.

And union minds are way fewer now, almost gone.

I would like to step back from that for just a minute though, and put the whole bill in a larger perspective, which is, you know, the legislators, whether their Congress or general assembly, really come in for a lot of criticism.

And that kind of criticism is rampant in Southern Illinois against the Illinois general assembly.

And a good deal of that is earned and justified.

Legislatures like slow, incremental change.

They don't like tackling these big issues and energy and climate change are big issues.

And they don't like to do those huge, complicated things like this bill turned out to be, but occasionally they do step up.

They're driven by partisanship.

They're driven by polarization at Congress level, at state legislature level.

And it makes it gridlock more often than big ticket items like this one getting done.

But in this case, I would say they rose to the occasion.

I used to tell my classes that Illinois general assembly doesn't always have a lot of finest hours, but the impeachment of the Blagojevich was one of those finest hours, in my estimation.

They did it by the constitution, by the books and they got, what was it, unanimous in the house and no, minus one in the house and unanimous in the Senate vote to convict Blagojevich.

And I think this bill is close to that in terms of being a model.

It was the old saw.

It's an ugly process seeing the sausage made, but it had to go into legislative overtime.

But that September 13 deadline finally concentrated the focus.

And I would say it was a victory in some senses for everyone that played the game, the interest groups, they got a hearing, they went and compromised again and again, and again, it got some partisanship.

What with 11 votes in the house, two votes in the Senate, down the Republican side, not a big bunch of partisanship, but still some bipartisanship.

And I would say finally, it was clearly a victory for speaker Welch, even for president Harman who was driving the process, stepped back from it and then got back on board at the end and certainly for governor Pritzker.

And he will clearly campaign on that and he will boast about that.

And in conclusion, it may also be true as the speaker said, this is kind of a different day, at least some indication that his, what he's calling decentralized leadership in this case got the job done.

- And I want to stick with you for a minute, John, to talk about, you know, this is the last of governor Pritzker's big policy pushes for his first four years.

And of course he announced a couple months ago that he would indeed run for a second term.

Not that that was in much doubt.

What kind of things can the governor now go around and say, and run on this?

- Well, let's look at the constituencies involved.

And I think to do that, let's go to the north end of the state because this was terribly important in Chicago and Chicago suburban.

It was terribly important in Springfield and in Marissa Metro east area, but the governor not going to get many counties in Southern Illinois anyway.

And that's indicative of the fact that all of the Republicans in Southern Illinois voted against this bill, but that is not the question you're asking.

You're asking about what's it take to win a statewide election and win the governorship and I would take the suburban area, collard counties, all of that, that was involved for them.

And I think generally people have mostly accepted that something's got to be done about our energy future.

So this is a legitimate thing for him to run on, a legitimate thing for his opponents to attack him on.

But I think he got the better of the deal in terms of even the politics of it.

- And Peter, do you see any long lasting scars that are going to be leftover from this fight, specifically between the governor and the Senate president or the governor and Republicans or Chris Welch and Republicans, because Republicans, they say that they were steamrolled in the process.

You know, yes, they got what they wanted in terms of not having the nuclear plants shut down.

But also, I mean, they are a super minority, does it matter?

- Yeah.

Well I mean, there's always going to be that tension between the Democratic leaders and the Republican leaders.

I don't think that's any surprise, I thought one of the really remarkable things about this bill was how they were able to get labor and environmentalists on the same page.

And that was very heavy lift.

Labor and environmental groups have typically been at odds with each other, gosh, going back to the spotted owl and the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest, that was a really difficult thing to do.

And I do remember at one point, governor Pritzker was saying, you know, I'm done negotiating, we're phasing out coal plants, and he couldn't get labor on board with that, even though they were saving thousands of labor jobs at the nuclear plants, but eventually through a lot of give and take and a lot of negotiation, they got this thing through.

Even, CWLP here in Springfield and Prairie state were neutral on the bill.

They didn't openly oppose it.

They weren't really backing it, but they stayed neutral on it.

So that was the most remarkable thing to me about this bill.

Are there going to be some bruised egos in the legislature?

Sure.

There always are, but you know, I don't, that's not really anything, all that different from, you know, they call that Tuesday.

- That is true.

That is true.

You know, I want to move on.

I want to move on to the governor appeared with leaders of planned parenthood, Illinois, and some congressional Democrats earlier this week at a clinic in Aurora to advocate for Congress passing this bill to kind of codify women's right to abortion in federal law.

John, you know, the house speaker Nancy Pelosi has said, she'll call it when Congress returns to Washington DC next week.

But what do you think its chances are in the Senate?

- Well, I think it's parallel and comparable to what we've already seen with the model of the voting rights law.

It's comparable too, in that the states that are controlled by the Republicans in this case, most notably, Texas, restricted the right to vote seriously.

Same thing in Florida, abortion now they've restricted access very seriously.

And with quite an unknown and unusual access to the process by these outsiders who blow the whistle and are sort of bounty hunters in a negative view on that.

So Texas not surprisingly is at the forefront of all of this.

And this is an attempt by the Democrats to do the only thing they can do, which is to pass a federal law on voting rights or on abortion rights.

And they've chosen to do that.

At least tried on voting rights, got through the house, probably not going to get through the Senate, probably the same fate would await an abortion bill that comes up, but you can't fault them for trying, because that's all that's left to them in the states where they're faced with the Republicans restrictions on both voting rights and now on abortion rights.

If you look at the supremacy cause in the United States constitution, or if you look at the equal protection clause, the 14th amendment, you see exactly what the answer is that if they can pass a federal law, it will absolutely contravene the state laws, whether it's voting rights or abortion rights.

So I see the two issues that it's very much the same in both coming out of Texas.

- Yeah.

And you know, after the US Supreme court kind of declined to weigh in on the constitutionality of the Texas six week abortion ban because the lawmakers in Texas did kind of a clever thing and there's no state official to sue to enjoin them because it's up to citizens to file a suit, you know, seeking $10,000 at minimum against abortion providers or women who seek abortions after six weeks.

So, you know, Peter, after the court refused to weigh in, we saw a big uproar in especially places like Illinois.

And we talk a lot about this all important suburban women vote.

How much of a motivator do you think that will be in Illinois?

Which where, by the way, we have, two years ago, when you arrived to cover the legislature, we passed this reproductive health act, which codifies abortion rights as a fundamental right in the state of Illinois.

- The important thing to remember, I think is that since Roe V Wade, which was nearly 50 years ago, two generations of women have been born and grown up into adulthood under a right of access to abortion services.

So to come in and try and take that away, I think it's going to alienate a lot of women voters.

Having said that, you know, I've been around this for most of that 50 years, abortion is the issue that has split America right down the middle and where the two sides are almost completely uncompromising on it.

And it's so divisive that it bleeds into everything else.

If you're in favor of abortion rights, I will not only oppose you, but I will oppose everything you stand for.

Same way on the other side, if you're anti-abortion, I will oppose you and everything you stand for.

And it's unfortunate, but that's the way it has been in the United States for close to 50 years.

- And John, you know, the governor making an appearance at planned parenthood, doing a bunch of social media kind of ads on his political account, making this a big issue as a male, is this something that we would have seen even 10 years ago in politics.

Or is it just the fact that now Roe V Wade is actually in danger of being overturned.

That's why we're seeing this.

- Well, I think it is a mobilizing factor.

It figured into the California recall election justice weight, for example.

And I think Peter's absolutely right.

It's very much a polarized issue and seems to be very difficult to find an in-between.

I think the governor just adds this to his list of things he's going to appeal to the voters of Illinois.

And in my estimation, he's on the somewhat more popular side of this one and the comments I made about Chicago and suburban Chicago are relevant here too.

I think he's doing what he thinks is right on a policy standpoint.

And I think it's the politically smart thing to do in Illinois.

- We used to have pro-life Democrats, pro choice Republicans, but I think our last quote-unquote pro-life Democrat, Dan Lapinski, he was of course voted out of office in March, 2020 when Marie Newman, you know, overtook him for the second time, on her second try rather in that primary.

So it's been interesting to watch, but Peter, before we end the show, we have about five minutes left.

I want to get to some COVID stuff.

I believe that you were monitoring a kind of parliamentary meeting this week, JCAR, the joint commission on administrative rules, which I know viewers already fell asleep, but tell us what happened there.

- Well, this was about the Illinois state board of education.

They, along with the department of health issued guidance a while back consistent with the governor's executive orders to require masks be worn indoors in schools at all times.

I guess it came down to the fact that ISBE has been extremely aggressive in enforcing that up to the point of putting school districts on probation and threatening to withhold their state funding if they don't come into compliance.

A lot of school districts, both public and non-public districts, have said they are not going to comply.

Most of those public school districts, after they got the warning letter have since voted to come into compliance.

I think there were only like four left that haven't, but a number of non-public districts, religious schools primarily, have been unrecognized as they say, which means that among other things, their diplomas are not recognized when their graduates apply to public universities and they're not allowed to compete in interscholastic events.

So this came before the joint committee on administrative rules.

It's this very, almost secretive obscure panel, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, evenly divided between the house and the Senate, and their job is to make sure that whatever administrative rules agencies put out are consistent with legislative intent, whenever the legislature authorized them to make these rules.

They were concerned that this thing about withholding funding and basically de-certifying school districts was outside of any administrative rule that had ever been adopted and was outside of any legislation that's ever been passed and on a 10 to nothing vote, actually, there were two members absent, after intense questioning by, mainly by Republicans on the committee.

The committee voted to encourage ISBE to put this into rule and to clarify what the procedure is for not recognizing a school district.

It's one of the very few times that the democratically controlled legislature or JCAR has really pushed back on governor Pritzker and his COVID-19 executive orders.

One was a year ago when the department of public health had an emergency rule where it would lead to prosecutions, criminal prosecution of businesses that did not follow the initial stay at home order.

They pushed back against that one.

And this thing about the mask mandates, they weren't arguing against mask mandates, it was very much a procedural thing about where do you get the authority to do this?

We want to see it in the rules, and we want some legislative oversight of this.

- Sure.

Because you know, any weakness in the legislative process could lead to weaknesses when you go to court, because this has been taken to court already.

We don't have very much time left, but John, in about 30 seconds, Southern Illinois, the rest of the state has gotten a little bit better with their waves of the Delta variant.

But Southern Illinois has not.

And Southern Illinois in the past two days have reported zero ICU beds available.

Just briefly, do you see things getting better?

Do you see people changing their minds and going ahead and following COVID restrictions or just no.

- Yeah it became apparent this week.

We're in real trouble in Southern Illinois.

It's important to point out that our vaccination rates in these counties here look like the south.

They look like Alabama, Mississippi along in there.

30% to 40% in each of these counties, it's a crisis among the unvaccinated.

And these problems have come home.

Southern Illinois healthcare is centered in Carbondale as is all healthcare.

They've got hospitals here and in Murphysboro and an outlet in Harrisburg and outlet in Herrin.

And they're full up.

They've been saying for weeks, they're stretched.

And they're saying, now that they're stretched and the system is broken and it's going to be difficult to get these people to go get vaccinated if all the evidence hasn't convinced them so far.

And yet at the same time, there are people being turned away.

There are people that can't get healthcare SIH has indicated again and again that they need help.

And they always follow it by saying, we need you to go get vaccinated whether or not that will get enough attention remains to be seen.

- Well, that's a really tough situation.

We hope that it'll get better, but of course people have to get vaccinated.

So we're out of time now.

I'd like to thank our guests, Peter Hancock, John Jackson.

I'm Hannah Meisel.

Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again next time on Capitol view.

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