It's Crunch Time

Unless something really major happens in the next couple days, it sounds like lawmakers are not going to pass an income tax hike before the end of session. Quite simply, there aren't enough Democrats willing to vote for raising the income tax if it also means the state still has to make big cuts to spending on social services. You know things are getting desperate when Senate President John Cullerton is asking Republicans to help pass a tax hike. (Remember, Senate Democrats have a supermajority, so they don't need Republican help to pass anything, even if they have to go into overtime; House Democrats are only one vote shy of a similar majority.) Obviously, there aren't enough Democrats willing to risk their seat in the General Assembly to vote for a tax hike.

In what seems to be turning into a weekly spectacle, another "taxpayer advocacy group" came out this week to press for their side of the budget debate. This week it was the Illinois Policy Institute and conservative anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist urging lawmakers to reject Quinn's proposed tax hike. They want the state to cut spending by 10 percent across-the-board; and they argue that can be done without cutting education spending at the classroom level or reducing eligibility for Medicaid. It would be nice to see their actual figures on this, but they didn't provide any. Not that I'm jumping up and down over the prospect of a tax hike, but I don't see how you can possibly make that deep of a cut to state spending without a significant impact on schools and Medicaid.

Meantime, the capital plan has hit a bit of a snag. I'm sure it will pass eventually, but as I told you last week, Gov. Pat Quinn says he won't sign off on the capital bills until lawmakers send him a balanced budget and ethics reforms. That's not going over well with top Democrats, since Quinn apparently promised he wouldn't tie his support for the capital bill to any other legislation. Rep. Lou Lang (D-Skokie) has moved to reconsider the vote on the capital bill, meaning it won't go to Quinn's desk until there's either another vote on the capital program or Lang withdraws his motion. Lang says he won'd do that until Quinn is prepared to sign the capital bill. Ultimately, this boils down to political posturing by both sides, but you'd think after the Blagojevich fiasco, lawmakers and the governor would be bending over backwards to get a construction program started ASAP.

Cullerton's office is still making it sound like session can wrap up on Friday, though House Speaker Mike Madigan isn't making any promises. Though from what I'm hearing around the capitol, it's more and more likely that lawmakers will just slap together a bare-bones budget and continue private negotiations this summer, then come back in the fall to vote on a tax hike (if not wait until next spring if they can cobble together enough money to get them through the first nine months of FY10). Either that, or they might pull the same trick as last year -- pass a budget that's out of whack and tell Quinn to cut spending where he chooses. Some things never change.