Very few things about this election were a surprise.
The Democrats took the House – not a surprise.
The GOP held the Senate – not a surprise, though I was surprised that they increased the number of seats.
Pritzker took the Illinois governor’s office, and now control every statewide office – not a surprise.
The Democrats regained their supermajority in the Illinois House, and then some, and increased their level of supermajority in the Illinois Senate – not a surprise, necessarily (I wasn’t really able to find local reporting on prospects for this), but I’d say the biggest disappointment of the night, especially because two local GOP incumbents, one in the district across the street and the other in our own district, with respect to whom we were flooded with mailers from his opponent, lost. (Ann Gillespie’s perky flyer says, “I won’t accept a pension.” Big deal, she’s a retired pharma executive; she’s already got a generous pension. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the massive underfunding and overpromising of Illinois pubic public pensions.)
So at the federal level, we won’t be seeing any meaningful legislation for the next two years, and the Democrats will spend their time with investigations of Trump’s nefarious activities and passing legislation that they know the Senate won’t take up, but that won’t be much different than the House under GOP control during Obama’s presidency, except that instead of Benghazi and go-nowhere Obamacare repeal, we’ll have investigations into Russia, border enforcement, Trump’s tax returns, etc, and a go-nowhere single-payer healthcare system. It’s not a pleasant prospect but it’s not as if the GOP has been passing bang-up stellar legislation over the past two years that we would have expected them to continue to do otherwise.
Or, alternatively, given that we’re learning that neither party really cares all that much about deficits, we’ll see some of that Trumpian dealmaking that we were promised — not about anything that really matters, like an immigration bill in which both sides do some meaningful compromising, but in the form of a large quantity of infrastructure spending.
But on the state level, well, Pritzker has promised one spending hike after the next, all to be funded by a graduated income tax just as soon as voters authorize it in 2020 (because our constitution forbids such, so it requires a voter-passed constitutional amendment). (What will he do in the meantime? Raise taxes on everyone? Use accounting tricks to start spending immediately with the promise it’ll all be put right after the tax hike is implemented? Or just pass bills with an effective date of “the day after Election Day, 2020”?) He has refused to reveal what sort of tax brackets he has in mind – that is, just how large a burden he’ll impose on the middle class and just how many wealthy people will flee the state. And at the same time, he has no interest in any sort of pension reform, despite the fact that it is blowing its own massive hole in the state budget.
And the super-supermajority of Democrats? One presumes that the endless anti-Tom Rooney flyers were not coming from Ann Gillespie’s personal wealth, but from the Madigan/Prizker war chest, and that this process was repeated over and over again in such a manner as to cow those Democrats into going along with Madigan/Prizker spending and taxing plans so long as they are able to bring some bacon home to their constituents. (“Yes, your tax rate has doubled, but don’t you like the new walking paths your tax money paid for?”)
And, again, I knew Pritzker would win and Rauner didn’t deserve to win anyway. But what I didn’t know – because I couldn’t find relevant information – was that he wouldn’t have any sort of check on him in terms of a strong enough GOP minority to maybe, to some slim degree, combine with hesitant Democrats to prevent the worst of his spending excesses.
So, readers, where should we move to?
Image: Illinois state capitol; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Illinoiscapitol2.jpg
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