(dramatic inspirational music) - Welcome to "Capitol View," the weekly program where we talk about state politics and government and how it might just affect you.

Joining me this week on "Capitol View" is Kent Redfield, Professor Emeritus of Political Science for the University of Illinois Springfield.

Welcome, professor.

- Good to be here.

- And also Peter Hancock, reporter for Capitol News Illinois.

Welcome, Peter.

- Good to see you, Bruce.

- As we are taping this on Thursday, we are one day removed from what folks thought would be perhaps a linchpin moment for Congressman Rodney Davis as his compatriots in Washington, D.C. decided that Liz Cheney is not the leader they want.

There had been a lot of speculation leading up on this as to which way would Mr. Davis vote.

Folks had ignored the possibility they would do it with a voice vote.

And so we really don't know now and we probably never will know.

Mr. Davis has not hinted at exactly which way he took.

He, "I like Donald Trump, I like Liz Cheney.

They're both great folks.

It's a big tent.

Can't we all get along," sort of.

But he is kind of, this issue has been shed somewhat from him, at least for now.

It may come up in the future.

Hours after this vote was taken, Mr. Davis issued a release, a press release saying that J.B. Pritzker is the worst governor ever.

What a horrible person he is.

We really gotta do better.

I don't know the particulars of it, but it was a typical, what you would expect as a broadside more or less, from a campaign.

There has been much speculation that Rodney Davis will run for governor at the next election.

Do we know anything more now than we did previously?

And how much might redistricting play into his decision, Kent?

- Well, we don't know, no.

We don't know a lot more.

It obviously allows him to talk about the issue from both sides, depending on the audience.

And you certainly would, if you were thinking about running statewide and putting together some kind of coalition of moderates and independents, along with your Republican base, you would have a slightly different tone than if you were running in a legislative district where you had been paired up with recently elected Representative Miller, who would be quite a bit to the right of Congressman Davis.

And would, you know, she's second to none in terms of being a Trump supporter.

So Davis will not know what his district looks like until we get a congressional map, and we may or may not get a congressional map before we actually get the official census data in September.

And since that's about the time you have to start filing petitions, or you know, circulating nominating petitions and stuff, it isn't the kind of crunch that you have with the state legislative map, but there's a lot of uncertainty there.

And you could, if the Democrats are of a mind, they could probably draw Miller and Davis and LaHood all in the same district.

I don't know that there'd be any partisan advantage other than just giving them headaches.

So- - And wouldn't it be fun to watch?

But go ahead.

- Yeah, but, and so it's, you know, everybody's keeping their options open and that's certainly what I view him as doing at this point is making sure that he doesn't commit too strongly in one direction or another, depending on how, you know, what looks like the best way to continue his political career.

- If you're Pritzker, at this point in time, and a lot can change, but at this point in time, if you're Pritzker and you had your druthers, would you rather run against LaHood or Davis?

- Oh, I think you'd like to run against a conservative downstate Republican.

- You want Darren Bailey, yeah.

- Yeah, or, you know, and I don't, you know, all of that would be preferable to running against someone who would appeal to Republican suburban voters in terms of a more, you know, general election kind of Republican candidate.

So I don't think Pritzker's particularly, you know, Davis's has potential candidacy probably doesn't bother him as much as either a billionaire backed moderate or for even Adam Kinzinger the Congressman from the district that wraps around the suburbs.

- Yeah, 'cause Kinzinger has so far alienated himself, I think, from the Trump block.

He's, it's questionable probably, you know, how much of that support he could get.

Davis is a different riddle in the sense that he has been a supporter of Trump in the past.

He's brought, I think the vice president, yes, Mike Pence to Illinois to fundraise for him.

He hasn't burned bridges.

And so at least in the way that some other folks have.

Darren Bailey, you're right professor, if I want to run against anybody, it's that guy statewide.

Now there's another issue facing the governor here that is almost has become a perennial or at least in the short term.

And that's the LaSalle Veteran's Home.

The first lawsuits are coming in and from what we're seeing so far, at least my observation, is this is potentially worse.

The facts of it are worse than what former Governor Rauner faced at the Quincy Veteran's Home.

How much can this stick to the Governor politically?

I mean, is there any way out for him because this stuff, they knew well in advance, unlike with Legionnaires' disease, that kind of dropped in some sense, it had been heard of before.

But there wasn't the whole country suffering from Legionnaires' disease and Governor Rauner's administration scrambled to deal with it and they were horrible at dealing with the press and getting their message across and coming across as arrogant and both to the public reporters and to the legislature.

This one has some real stuff in it, in the sense of very common sense measures weren't taken and people died.

Does the Governor gonna have chance to recover from this?

Is it gonna hurt him that badly?

- I don't think so, Bruce.

Everybody wants to compare this to the incident with the Quincy Veteran's Home a few years ago.

And, you know, looking at it as an outsider that I was, the issue with the Quincy Home was kind of symbolic, you know what I mean?

That fiasco just sort of represented a governor who was asleep at the wheel and was not tending to the business of the state.

I don't think you can make that same argument about the LaSalle Home, although I do agree, it's serious.

We knew there was a pandemic.

We knew how it was being spread.

They didn't take the steps that were needed, but I don't know that you can lay all of that on the Governor's desk.

They got rid of the person who was in charge of that home, there is now a new leadership at the Department of Veteran's Affairs.

You know, I think the Governor has done pretty much everything that he can do.

You got Republicans calling for some sort of criminal investigation.

And maybe there was some criminal negligence going on, but I just, I question how much of that you can lay directly at the feet of the Governor's office.

- Well, if I was running the ad, here's what I would do.

I'd have the family member of dead veteran there saying, "Grandpa died because Governor Pritzker decided he was gonna appoint a political crony to run the home where everything broke down.

The Governor puts politics ahead of lives."

That's how I'd run it.

And I'm not sure that that's entirely inaccurate, putting a former legislator in charge of Veteran's Affairs.

- Well, yeah, I think that's a legitimate criticism.

But, you know, I mean, when it comes to election time, there are gonna be a lot of issues, the dynamics of a statewide race like that, kind of a thousand different ways.

I just, you know, sitting here now a year and a half out from it, I, you know, I'm not entirely sure how strongly this is gonna play.

- Fair enough.

Let's talk about some good news.

The state is awash in money.

That's what we're getting from, your smiling, Mr. Redfield.

(laughs) That's the message we're getting from, help me out of this, I always get it, the Commission on Forecasting Government, the money folks, Kafka, has just come out with a new report saying we think we're gonna get $2 billion more than we thought we were going to get, just in March, just a few months ago.

Is this going to, what effect might this have?

How much easier does it make the job of Pritzker and legislators?

And also Mendoza is growing, our comptroller, we're out of debt.

Our past due bills are all paid up.

We're current.

She's going to, you know, the bond rating agency is saying, you know, we deserve to be a tick or so above junk status.

We're now fiscally responsible.

How much easier, if at all, is this gonna make the job of the legislature and the governor during these waning days of the session when they do have to pass a budget?

- Well, it will give you some wiggle room in terms of pretending that you've got all your bases covered without kicking, you know, your debt over into the next fiscal year.

And that's dangerous more than anything else.

I mean, we're not, yeah, we've got, we're paying bills, you know, down to what would be the more normal cycle, assuming that, you know, I mean, that also includes a lot of borrowed federal money that we're now trying to pay back.

It assumes revenue assumptions that, you know, we could have runaway inflation, which would be bad for the economy, but good for sales tax collections.

There's a ton of uncertainty.

The Governor has just promised $350 million to fund a school aid formula, which he was saying he was gonna withhold to try and leverage some revenue somewhere else.

And, you know, this is their projection about, you know, maybe you can count on $700 million of revenue that you could really put into the base.

And that's one of the problems is kind of figuring out what is continuing growth and what are one time sorts of things.

So it allows you to be engaged in some happy talk.

It allows you to fund some things that you might not have, you know, prudently been able to do, but it also decreases your leverage to go out and get the loopholes, the corporate loopholes the governor wants, which would be things that would be built into the base.

If you stopped giving certain kinds of tax credits, then you're eliminating tax expenditures, you're building things into the permanent base.

And so from a budgeting standpoint, the Republicans would like it to, the state, to look as insolvent as possible going into the 2024 election and the Democrats would prefer that we kind of, you know, fudge through so that we can balance things on paper and not have the real bill, the real, you know, serious budget discussion take place until we're into Governor Pritzker's second term.

So there's an awful lot of shadow boxing in terms of this without really coming clean in terms of what we can afford, how solid are our revenue sources, and what are the hard choices?

And if you can avoid the hard choices, and kick it down the road, that's the best traditions of financing Illinois government.

So I'm not sure what, how this will play out, when we actually get to a real budget for the coming fiscal year, but, it's not, you know, it's not terrible news.

But we don't know how much of it is real or permanent.

- One thing that strikes me, wasn't his first budget cycle, there was $5 billion in found money?

And now it's, this is in the same sense, but there's 2 billion more than we thought we'd have.

Has Christmas just come in spring for this governor, or is he just lucky?

(Bruce and Kent laugh) - It's- - I have, no, go ahead, Peter.

- Well, you know, I was gonna say the other sort of elephant in the room is the way we got through this fiscal year was by borrowing about $3.2 billion from the federal reserve.

That money has to be paid back in a fairly short span of time.

The original plan was that they would take, Illinois is supposed to get seven and a half to $8 billion from the American Rescue Plan in the relief that they're giving out to state and local governments.

But we're now hearing the treasury department is not going to let States use that to pay down debt, including our treasury debt.

So, yeah, it's good that we have, revenue is coming in faster than expected, but we've still got some pretty huge bills sitting out there.

So, I wouldn't exactly call it a Christmas gift.

The state still has some very serious fiscal pressures on it.

- Yeah, no, fair enough.

I've seen worse lumps of coal, however.

Let's talk for a little bit about unemployment here.

NPR ran a pretty good story this week, well it came out today, about Pritzker not eager to end $300 extras per week in unemployment benefits for folks who are collecting unemployment, even as governors in other States are saying now we're, it's time to end these extra unemployment benefits.

Also we've got the state's eviction moratorium continues even though a federal judge has struck down a moratorium on evictions at the federal level.

Unemployment, how is this playing?

I mean, you've got the business community saying, lift them.

We can't find enough folks to apply for jobs, unemployment's low considering, and so it's time to end them.

Is this the Governor's marker in any way sense, shape, or form about here's how I deal with a pandemic and those who have been thrown out of work or the less fortunate?

- You know, I think that one of the lessons we're gonna learn from this is, you know, everybody is anxious for the economy to get back to normal.

And I think one of the things we've learned through this is that normal really wasn't working out that well for a lot of people.

And there are too many jobs out there that pay low wages, that don't don't pay enough to afford childcare.

And, you know, I think the labor market and the employment overall is gonna have to make some adjustments coming out of this because, you know, like I said, normal wasn't working out very well for a lot of people.

- And, you know, we're, this plays into the broad political narratives.

If you're a Republican governor and you've got a constituency that, you know, believes that we got a lot of lazy people out there who are than happy to collect those unemployment checks rather than work that are just having a, you know, a nice vacation and eventually they'll get back into the labor force.

That plays into a narrative about that you're a tough fiscal conservative.

You're about fostering initiative.

Your Democratic governor, then, you're talking about the single mom who's sitting at home and she doesn't have any childcare.

And if she loses those unemployment benefits, then she probably still can't afford, you know, if she goes back to work, she can't afford the childcare.

And so we're pushing the children into child poverty.

And so, you know, and so we have these competing myths about what's the nature of the workforce and how much we have to incentivize people to work.

And there's no data on this.

This is, we're back to Ronald Reagan's welfare queen in terms of talking about, you know, what does that labor market actually look like?

And I think Peter makes an excellent point that it became clear when, that we don't have the kind of child support.

We don't have a network in terms of daycare, in terms of the kinds of things that can keep people in the labor market.

Particularly two person families is that woman, and it's usually a woman, staying at home with the kids because they can't get childcare.

But it's the husband that has the job, you know, and so is, you know, how do we, how do we get her back into the labor market?

Do we cut off her extra unemployment benefits or do we figure out a way to provide more childcare support?

So there's some pretty broad narratives that are there here, and there's real data.

And it's a serious policy question, but it's also about the political myths and the narratives that you're, you know, that the parties are presenting to their supporters.

So the fact that Republican governors are going one way and Democratic governors are going another, I think is, you know, is indicative of how this plays out at kind of an ideological level.

- No, how, again, all of these are excellent points.

How does it play in the suburbs?

I'm not sure.

I mean, it's refreshing if nothing else, on some level, to see somebody who was walking their talk and hopefully he is walking his talk in terms of putting forth these programs or extending these programs when there is, seems to be some sentiment out there.

It might not be the politically expedient thing to do.

And other governors are taking a different course of action.

I want to talk for a second about my record collection.

Folks may have noticed that I have a few albums, and you can't see it, but the wall opposite me is also full of record albums.

I can guarantee you, there is not a single album by REO Speedwagon amongst them.

This week, Governor Pritzker, well not Governor Pritzker, I'm sorry, the state of Illinois has announced a new song to stimulate folks to go out and see the state after being cooped up from pandemic.

It's "Time to Drive."

Which is a takeoff from the REO Speedwagon song, "Time to Fly."

Let me read the lyrics if I could, for just a second, from this song that we have borrowed to promote tourism.

"I've been around for you, been up and down for you, but I just can't get any relief.

I've swallowed my pride for you, lived and lied for you, but you still make me feel like a thief."

Is that the sort of imagery we want to evoke when we see folks driving around Illinois to see such great sites, and we do have many in the state of Illinois, Galena and Southport.

Because that's what I think of, having been around in 1979.

And it struck me perhaps there might be better alternatives.

We have a lot of musical groups from this state going way back.

We have Earth, Wind, and Fire, we have Buddy Guy, we have Miles Davis, we have Cheap Trick, we even have Sticks.

And we picked REO Speedwagon.

Am I the only person here who thinks that maybe we might've been able to have done a little bit better?

Go ahead, anyone.

- Yes, I think you are the only person who thinks that.

(group laughs) I was at that press conference, and I got to tell you, it made me want to get out and drive around the state.

It's been a long time.

I've been stuck here in Springfield for a long time.

My father was originally from Southern Illinois and used to take us down to Shawnee National Forest and the old Stone Face and Garden of the Gods, places like that.

And I really miss it and that commercial, it made me want to get back on the road and go see some stuff in Illinois.

- Oh, that's so nice.

Misty water colored memories, how beautiful.

What do you think, Professor?

- I'm not sure that, yeah, well I'm not sure it's a campaign designed to appeal to millennials.

I actually do know, do remember REO Speedwagon, and probably have some of those songs on my iPhone and my, you know, Boomer's playlist, but it is, you know, Illinois is not doing a good job of trying to promote the state and, you know, but that's part of the problem is Illinois is a whole bunch of different states.

And so, you can promote Lincoln in Springfield, and Chicago in Chicago and downstate Illinois.

And, you know, I don't know whether the best approach to tourism is something that is very focused on specific areas or whether you can really run a statewide campaign that will have everybody humming along with the joys of Illinois.

So I'm not sure it's an easy task.

- Well, they could satisfy the needs of three white Boomers in glasses, male Boomers in glasses, if they went with Sticks.

Welcome to the grand illusion.

Come on out and see what's happening, pay your price, get your tickets to the show.

It does the same sort of thing, doesn't it?

And we could have imagery of Cubs games.

We could have all sorts of things and we could go on and on for forever, but unfortunately we are out of time.

And so thanks for joining us this week on "Capitol View."

Stay tuned and we'll see you next week.

(dramatic inspirational music)