(suspenseful music) - Welcome to CapitolView, where we discuss the latest in state government and politics.

I'm Hannah Meisel with NPR, Illinois.

Joining us this week is Kent Redfield, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois, Springfield.

Thanks for being here, Kent.

- Good to be here.

- And also here is Dave McKinney of Chicago public radio station WBEZ.

Glad you're here, Dave.

- Hey, Hannah.

- Oh, let's get down to it.

We are about five, six weeks away from the end of session.

A very unique session because it has been forcefully truncated by COVID and everyone is trying to fit an entire five months worth of work into essentially two months.

And it's been quite hectic.

budget making is always something, of course it is the legislature's sole responsibility, if you wanna get technical, but it's always something that when other big things pop up, it sometimes gets pushed to the wayside and is not necessarily in the main news.

But in a year where we have been defined by a pandemic recession, budget making is quite difficult.

Of course, the state has 7 1/2 billion dollars coming to it from federal stimulus funds, the American Rescue Plan.

But that doesn't mean that that's that one time money is gonna solve the state's structural deficits.

In an op-ed penned by the governor and House Speaker Chris Welch and Senate president Don Harmon in Crain's Chicago Business last week, they laid out some vague plans for spending that money.

They said that 2 1/2 billion definitely had to go toward paying down federal borrowing that we did to plug holes in not just this current year's budget, but the last year's.

But other than that, we still have a lot of other debt that we could use for that money but they also say we should prioritize it to spur economic growth.

So Dave, there's gonna be a lot of pressure on the leaders, especially House Speaker Chris Welch since he is so new and he's trying to push back against those who want to paint him in the mold of Mike Madigan, his longtime predecessor, there's gonna be pressure to say, well, let's create some new programs and use some of that federal stimulus money.

How important is it for him to resist those calls and how difficult will it be for him to do that?

- Well, I don't know if that it's important for him to resist the calls necessarily.

I mean, he has to keep peace within that caucus.

And I think that in the climate we're in, everything has something to do with COVID.

And so I think they can get pretty liberal in way that they define what is a COVID-related response in order to spend that money.

I mean, it's obviously a luxury that Illinois has as well as the other states.

I mean, states across the country are swimming in all of the stimulus money and enough so that the rating agencies have given Illinois with its near junk bond status.

A bit of a reprieve.

And so I think that there will be efforts to try to use some of that money creatively in ways that will satisfy the democratic caucuses, especially heading into the next election cycle.

I mean, I think you mentioned the Crain's column.

What's interesting about that, it didn't create a ton of news because we we've known for a long time that from the moment that that money was coming to Illinois, Pritzker made clear that he wanted to spend it to pay off the debts.

The state's debts related to COVID.

And so that's really the point of that column but I think the bigger picture with that column is it just shows that the three democratic leaders, the governor, Senator President Harmon and Speaker Welch are pretty much in lock step here as we head into the home stretch on a lot of key issues.

And so, I think it'll be interesting to see how things unfold but I do think that there, things look very well choreographed between the three of them right now.

- That's a good point.

Because especially after the governor's budget address when he laid out his plans and priorities, there was a lot of pushback we should say, in the democratic ranks, especially on his ideas for skipping a $315 million payment up and above what we spent last year.

Year over year goes back to this 2017 school funding formula fix.

It was a big deal, but the governor said, sorry, we can't afford it, but federal money is coming to us.

But he's still got pushed back for that.

He's also gotten a lot of pushback on his ideas for ending certain tax credits that he calls corporate loopholes.

Of course, he was the one who negotiated a few of those a couple of years ago in his first year as governor.

But we also have this structural budget deficit that we've had for decades and it's not going away.

The governor's preferred plan to solve that was the graduated income tax and voters rejected that in November.

But we were talking before we started filming about this latest report from the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability about if we don't address those structural deficits about how high our deaths could explode too.

So what did that report say and what is the danger here if we addressed?

- Yeah, the reality is that the drivers of our fiscal problems in terms of pitch and that, particularly in terms of revenue shortfall, when you look at normal cost increases for providing services, in a lot of the state budget is very, it's personnel.

There isn't a lot of technological savings that one can apply to investigating child abuse claims within the Department of Children and Family Services.

And so the stimulus money will probably allow us to fully fund the new school formula that's supposed to be redirecting money on the basis of need in addition to the base which is not as sensitive in terms of need.

But we're going to continue with unpaid bills.

We haven't really made a significant, had a significant impact on cutting those unpaid bills.

There's a real danger in the debt going up.

If we try to cover too many things in terms of new spending.

And this is one-time money.

So, the cynical political view is if you can get a budget that everybody can live with with one-time money to get you to July before the election next year, and then pass moot, smoke and mirrors to get you through the election, we've put off dealing with reality until some governor's second, Pritzker's second term or the new governor's first term.

So, there still are, the governor was asking for a cut in the local government distributed fund, which is money going out of the income tax to units of local governments, cities and counties.

So, there are a lot of tough fights still there.

We had another proposal about some revenue increases in addition to the loopholes.

There's another one that's apparently out there today.

And I don't know whether there's stomach for dealing with it on the revenue side.

Some areas are just gonna continue to get hammered.

Higher ed is continuing on what's been two decades of decline in state support at a time when they've got real problems because of the pandemic in terms of enrollment.

So there's not a lot of good news beyond yeah, we've got a life preserver, a lifeline, whatever but that's gonna go away and we're gonna be stuck out there in that ocean of debt to continue the analogy here.

So yeah, I think they'll put something together.

There's nothing that Republicans can do to stop it.

But I think it's gonna be a very fragile kind of budget that is not sustainable beyond the coming fiscal year.

So I don't think there's a lot of good longterm good news in this other than there's some political good news and being able to kind of keep everything afloat for another 12 months.

- And you make a good point there.

It's hardly seems possible, but 2022 is around the corner and we will see yet another gubernatorial campaign season.

It seems as if the governor Pritzker's term just began and we had this last COVID year.

But a lot of the things that he wanted to do were served by pandemic but also, this big major investigation from the excuse me, the Department of Justice and this big swirling scandal that continues on and on around former House Speaker Mike Madigan and other lawmakers and other politicians.

Ed Burke, long time city council alderman in Chicago Ed Burke.

It was, gosh, what?

More than two years ago that we first learned that the feds were looking into him and this week, a whole new kind of book of stuff dropped.

And a lot of the things that the governor had wanted to do, say on energy.

One of the first things that he did in office was signing an executive order saying that Illinois would adhere to the Paris climate agreement.

And this was, at the time, Donald Trump was still president and we of course, as a nation, unjoined that agreement.

But energy especially has been a push for a lot of progressives, which includes the governor but also been very, very complicated by this scandal.

That, of course, all goes back to Mike Madigan.

And last summer, when we found out that ComEd had signed this deferred prosecution agreement, admitting that yes, for a decade, they attempted to bribe the speaker.

So Dave, when folks talk about the need for a new energy omnibus bill, they're not just talking about the need for ethics, but that's a piece that progressives are not gonna leave behind.

So what's going on there?

How important is it that the ethics piece goes into a big energy omnibus bill?

And what happens if people don't think that it's strong enough?

Will people trust this legislation and will it get over the finish line by the end of May?

- Well, it's still unclear to me quite what the map is gonna look like.

Not the map we may talk about later but the map to get some kind of energy legislation to completion because ComEd and Exelon have been, I think they've quietly been working this bill.

I mean, they certainly have a stable of lobbyists, not as big as in the past, but certainly a stable of lobbyists.

They have been slipping in committees on at least a couple of the big bills that are out there right now.

So they're a bit on the sidelines, but they very, very much wanna see something done here that enables basically a windfall for them, dealing with their nuclear plants.

They've threatened to close the Byron and Dresden nuclear plants.

And that gives them enormous leverage, scandal or not, in the upcoming few weeks here, because if they move ahead of that threat, there are all sorts of layers of federal regulatory approval.

They have to get first.

But if they do that, it costs about 1,500 union workers their jobs, the IBEW of course, is, been front and center in trying to get subsidies for the nuclear plants.

And then it also deals a real big blow to Pritzker's plan, as you mentioned, to green energy.

These two plants generate an enormous amount of energy that doesn't count toward the state's carbon footprint.

And so it's important.

And Pritzker wants those nuclear plants to somehow stay open.

And as we saw last week, his administration released a consultant's report that recommended up to $350 million in subsidies for Exelon to keep these plants open.

On the ethics question, I mean, Kent can attest to this having watched these federal investigations crop up and then the response in the legislature toward ethics.

I mean, I think there will be some kind of ethics package related to the scandal.

I mean, it could impact for example, the way lobbying takes place.

I mean, there was a lot of secretive lobbying, undisclosed lobbying that's going on.

So I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of effort to clamp down on that.

There's also an effort to get rid of the formula rate structure that was part of the 2011 ComEd bill that went through.

And that costs great payers hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade.

And then there's also a question about how do you regulate these requests for favors that legislators make toward the utility companies?

As we saw in the case that was presented against ComEd, allegedly, former House Speaker Michael Madigan was able to place a lot of his political workers at ComEd.

It was sort of a secret patronage place for him.

And so I think there's an effort at least, on a disclosure level to try to make that information public.

So that at least, there could be a shaming piece of this, I guess, if a legislator or someone, or a public official somewhere is asking for all sorts of favors and then voting the way that utilities companies want.

So it's a big bundle here.

There has to be something that happens and don't forget the one wild card in all of this is what the federal government does with Madigan himself.

Madigan has not been charged, but there's been a lot of speculation that he could be.

And he's been spending enormous amounts of campaign on it.

(dog barks) That's my pup there, sorry.

Spending tons of money out of his campaign fund on legal expenses.

His (dog barking drowns speaker) is up in the air.

- And Kent, you're the campaign finance expert here.

There was a series of hearings that were done pre-COVID last year, pre-shut down, all about, okay, what ethics reforms can we make in the wake of, and this is even before we knew about the ComEd and the deferred prosecution agreement.

But I thought it was interesting during all of those hearings that happened last winter, none of them touched campaign finance.

And how difficult, I mean, you've seen several rounds of campaign finance reform, but do you feel as if lawmakers are not gonna want to touch that in any sort of ethics package that they pass in the next year or so?

- No, I would really be surprised if they tried to deal directly with the role of money in politics.

I mean, it's too constrained at the federal level and it's too difficult for legislators to deal with in terms of the way that that money flows into the general assembly.

There are kind of two pieces of this.

You can write ethics legislation in relation to public utilities, which Commonwealth.

(laughs) Which the energy companies are, public utilities.

And so you can have a tough set of regulations that don't apply to the manufacturers or the beer distributors or the nursing homes or whatever, but you can also write more general legislation that is with lobbying, conflict of interest, those sorts of things.

And so I think it's likely that you're going to get an ethics piece in an energy bill because then you can say, we responded to Commonwealth Edison and the Madigan scandal.

And you can do that and provide some cover and be tough without extending it to the general practice of lobbying and politics.

And so I'd be surprised if there isn't something in the energy bill.

I don't know what a broader bill is going to look like.

And so, yeah, we had four years of activity without doing anything talking about ethics.

Now, we're not doing that because we're having flurries of activity talking about redistricting reform and not doing anything.

And so we're focusing on redistricting rather than ethics.

And so I think it's not likely that probably disclosure, something that is almost unenforceable, but is a feel good sort of thing in terms of conflict of interest.

I think those things are still possible but it could likely be just focusing on a bill that is about regulating public utilities rather than the more broader sweep of things.

I'd be surprised if there isn't something because they'll want to go to the voters and say, we pass the ethics reform bill of 2021.

And the average says in this, there's no feedback loop there for the average citizen.

They have no idea whether that's really effective.

We got good conflict of interest legislation or disclosure.

And then, if the BGA doesn't like that, the average citizen is gonna have to figure out who the better government association is and get some information from them.

So you can pass stuff that sounds good without really having any impact.

And that certainly has been our tradition in our world.

- Good way of putting it.

With about five minutes left, I would like to talk about that redistricting that you just brought up, Kent.

Democrats staged, gosh, more than I think two dozen hearings all across the state.

They invited members from the public.

Some were physically in some areas of the state, some were virtual and this was their way, this is their cover to say, well, we asked for so much public participation because they want to cover themselves for the fact that they want to go ahead and meet this June 30th deadline that's in the constitution to avoid the chance, the 50-50 chance that Republicans might get control over the map making process.

So, Dave, do you think that ultimately, it'll come back to bite Democrats that for several years, I mean, back in 2016, when there is a citizen-led amendment drive to amend the constitution for an independent commission to draw the maps?

A lot of folks got on board with that idea.

Maybe not that idea specifically, but a version of that idea saying that legislators should not be the ones drawing the maps.

And here we are in 2021.

And they say, well, the census data is maybe not so good.

We just gotta go ahead with it.

Do you think that this comes back to bite them later?

Or do you think that they're gonna get a pass on this?

- No, I think it's actually gonna be quite the opposite.

I think it will benefit them for the next 10 years.

I think that they very much are in the driver's seat now.

I mean, I think the best hope that the Republicans can have in trying to stop this is through litigation both at the state and the federal level.

If they get a break on one of the, I mean, they haven't said that's their plan yet, but if they could throw a wrench into the process that way, which I kinda think is unlikely, especially at the Illinois Supreme court, it's democratic controlled.

I think Democrats are in the driver's seat.

And I think what is sort of interesting about this process, everybody has thrown around the term fair map and what does a fair map look like?

And if there are efforts made to preserve Black representation, Latino representation, Asian-American representation or expand on it.

That, in many minds, would constitute a fair map.

And so I think that emphasis on diversity gives Democrats kind of, that's the playbook I would imagine.

And another aspect that I think is kind of, gonna be very interesting politically is what is the Republican congressional delegation look like?

Which one of these persons becomes the odd man or woman out?

I mean, does an Adam Kinzinger get iced out or a Rodney Davis get iced out or a Mary Miller?

And then what happens when Kinzinger, it's been talked about both for US Senate and for governor, same with, I mean, Davis has been kicking around, possibly running for governor.

So, I mean, I think whoever gets left out on the side of the road, maybe looking to a statewide run.

- Sure, and, you know.

I think it's very interesting that even with Madigan gone, the Democrats taking this approach, and like you said, they are in the driver's seat, they control both chambers with supermajorities and the governor's mansion.

And so why would they give up that democratic control?

And it's the legacy of Madigan if you ignore a lot of the other things is that he kept Illinois blue in the sea of Midwest red.

And that was his strategy.

And the maps that we'll likely see later this year will be a continuation of that.

Well, we are almost out of time.

I'd like to thank my guests, Kent Redfield, Dave McKinney.

Thank you so much for joining us and please tune in again, next time for CapitolView.

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