“The woke Left is coming after me for peeing on a tree during my college days,” state Representative Adam Niemerg (R-Dietrich) told me not long ago.

“Mayors slam Pritzker’s proposal to eliminate grocery tax” was the Daily Herald’s headline above a story last week about several mayors of upper-income suburban communities complaining about a proposed tax cut. I don’t know if the mayors quite understand this, but headlines like that are basically an in-kind campaign contribution to the governor and the Democratic super-majority.

Governor JB Pritzker proposed some changes to the state’s pension system during his budget/State of the State speech last month that will likely please the New York City-based bond-rating agencies by giving them something they want, as well as his fellow Democrats by freeing up some money to spend on other things.

Two press conferences held after Governor JB Pritzker’s budget address last week didn’t receive much news-media attention. As the saying goes, coverage follows conflict, and the two pressers were far more subtle and polite in their criticisms of the governor’s plan than those held by Republicans, so they were mostly overlooked. But clear undercurrents were visible during both events, one held by the Legislative Black Caucus and the other by the Legislative Latino Caucus. And unlike the Republicans, those two caucuses actually have considerable sway over the state’s lawmaking process.

“Everybody gets pinched, but you did it right; you told 'em nothin' and they got nothin'” Jimmy Conway told a youthful Henry Hill in the classic gangster movie GoodFellas after the mob-connected teenager was arrested for selling stolen cigarettes, clammed up to the police and was then released by a corrupt judge. “You learned the two greatest things in life,” Conway told Hill. “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.”

Way back in 1990, I was making $17,000 a year working for an online Statehouse news and information company. I was too broke for a vacation, so I helped pay for a modest trip by covering a strike at the Delta Pride catfish-processing company in Indianola, Mississippi, for a few publications. Almost all of the striking workers were Black women, and their highly-unusual walk-out had caused a national stir. I was fascinated by what was happening and wanted to see the action up close.

Republican Dennis Reboletti is trying something different in a state legislative race: Stake out a “moderate” position on abortion in a party which completely rejects that stance and in a race against a solidly pro-choice Democrat.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s budget that he passed last November deliberately underfunded programs for asylum-seekers. The meager appropriation authority could be exhausted by April, but nobody knows yet what the city plans to do when it reaches that point.

One of the bigger state budget-expansion fights we could see play out in Springfield this spring is the creation of a permanent $300 Child Income Tax Credit. The new proposal has been scaled back from last year’s $700 per child tax credit bill, which went nowhere in the House after it was introduced in February and ultimately had fifteen sponsors and co-sponsors. But proponents say even the downsized version would make a major difference.

Perhaps the weakest federal criminal charge against former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke was about his plot to extort the Chicago Field Museum because a friend’s daughter never heard back about an internship after Ald Burke sent over her résumé. U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Kendall seemed “unimpressed” by federal prosecutors’ reasoning in mid-December after Burke’s legal team moved to dismiss the charge ahead of closing arguments, according to Tribune reporter Jason Meisner.

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