A crazy session in Springfield gets even zanier

A crazy session in Springfield gets even zanier
CAROL MARIN cmarin@suntimes.com
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times
August 15, 2007

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
-- Hunter S. Thompson


Did Hunter Thompson actually KNOW Rod Blagojevich?

The wild-eyed governor of this legislatively crazed state waited until 11:30 p.m. Monday, after late newscasts had signed off and the state's newspapers had been put to bed, to finally announce what he was going to do about the 10 percent pay raises for state officeholders including those legislators with whom he is so furious.

Thirty minutes before the bewitching hour when the bill would have become law without his signature, Blago decided to holster his veto revolver, reign in his "testicular virility" and reverse himself, allowing the pay raises he pledged to block to become law.

If this was his way of salvaging whatever goodwill he still has in his own clinically depressed Democratic Party, I shudder to see the reception waiting for him today when he arrives for Governor Day at the State Fair in Springfield.

Word is his minions were frantically trying to bus in troops to cheer the guv as he arrives, but recruiting reportedly had been a little rocky. Offering free "Blagojevich shirts" didn't seem to be helping. Especially now that the governor is promising to gut public works projects in legislators' districts to pay for a universal health insurance plan that they forcefully opposed.

I've never argued, and never will, that Blago alone wears the jacket for the disaster that is Springfield. But the governor, by doing goofy things like Monday's eleventh-hour decision-making, provoked everyone, including his nemesis, House Speaker Mike Madigan.

And then Tuesday, like a gunslinger at high noon, Blagojevich showed how he can both giveth and taketh away, giving the pay raise with one hand but then taking away by amendatory veto $200 million in treasured "member initiative" grants. That's the $1.3 million each senator and the $650,000 each representative gets to pay for projects -- some fat, but some definitely not -- like pools and parks and firetrucks that legislators annually bestow upon their districts.

Under the Blagojevich plan, that money plus another $300 million in unspecified cuts -- $500 million in all -- will be diverted from the budget so he can provide health insurance for more than half a million uninsured Illinoisans. He portrays it as mammograms over pork, but it honestly isn't that simple.

Senate President Emil Jones, standing with the governor, promises not to call for an override of Blagojevich's plan. Take that, Mike Madigan, they're saying. The whole thing caused a seismic rumble in Springfield on Tuesday, with aftershocks still being felt today. And the fight has only just begun.

Since the governor dropped this latest bomb but refused to answer questions, we lack a lot of important answers. Whose projects will be slashed? Whose won't? Can the governor constitutionally shift money vetoed out of one part of the budget into another? And are the health-care costs he lists realistic?

If it was vendetta time in the state Capitol before, it is now worse 10 times over.

Collegial compromise now might require nothing short of divine intervention. Then again, remember what Hunter Thompson warned about that:

"Call on God, but row away from the rocks."