After taking a pandemic-induced hiatus from proposing large, permanent base spending-increases and instead using most revenue increases for one-time expenditures, Governor JB Pritzker’s recently-proposed Fiscal Year 2024 state budget appears to increase base operational-spending by at least $2.75 billion, or 7.9 percent. Annual pension payments will also rise by a relatively modest $201 million, which ups the total base spending-increase to $2.95 billion.

The legislature’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability released its latest monthly fiscal report last week. The report claimed the state is still on track to match the commission’s revised November estimate of a $4.1 billion revenue increase for the current fiscal year. Revenue had originally been projected to fall from the previous fiscal year. And much of the recently-projected increase is believed to be a one-time event and has so far been treated as such.

State records show that Dan Proft’s People Who Play by the Rules PAC spent almost $36 million during the second half of 2022, mostly on advertising boosting Senator Darren Bailey’s gubernatorial bid and opposing Governor JB Pritzker. Of that, $2.4 million was spent on consulting. Former ABC7 political reporter Charles Thomas was paid $100,000 in two $50,000 installments. Thomas appeared in some of Proft’s ads praising Bailey.

The Rockford Register-Star reported last week that the state of Illinois “has submitted what could be its best offer to keep the Belvidere Assembly Plant operating and save what could be thousands of jobs.” Stellantis announced in December it would idle its Jeep Cherokee assembly plant in February. So there appears to be a glimmer of hope that the state can finally notch a victory with a carmaker after years of trying. And the online Web site Jalopnik recently reported that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin told the Ford Motor Company that he didn’t want their $3.5 billion electric vehicle-battery plant which would employ 2,500 workers because the company had partnered with China.

“All they are saying,” claimed Illinois Sheriffs Association executive director Jim Kaitschuk about dozens of his members, “is ‘We’re not going to knock on people's doors to ask whether they have registered their firearms. And if they're arrested solely on that charge, we will not house them in our jails until ordered to do so by a competent authority.”

When the Democrats get their act together during a legislative lame-duck session, they can really pass a lot of stuff in short order. We’ve seen it before. Two years ago, the Democrats passed a huge amount of important legislation, including the SAFE-T Act, in just a few days.

Kankakee County Judge Thomas Cunnington set off a chaotic chain reaction December 29 with his ruling that the General Assembly over-stepped its constitutional grounds when it voted to eliminate cash bail. Judge Cunnington essentially said that a cash-bail requirement, even though not specifically mentioned in the constitution, could be inferred; and that the General Assembly had exercised powers that properly belonged to the judicial branch.

Illinois House Deputy Majority Leader Jehan Gordon-Booth (D-Peoria) headed up her chamber’s efforts to amend the controversial SAFE-T Act this year. The day before the bill came up for a vote, I asked her what were, in her opinion, the largest misconceptions about the 2021 social justice reform law. Gordon-Booth pointed to the trespassing issue. “I don't care if you live in rural, urban, suburban. The trespassing [issue] was one that just made a lot of folks incredibly uncomfortable.”

There’s been sort of an unwritten rule the past several years in Springfield to stay away from doing things like ban assault weapons. The votes to pass one have seemingly been there in both chambers, but the will of past Democratic leadership seemed to be to not overtly poke any big, cash-rich bears, like the National Rifle Association, or to alienate or electorally imperil conservative members of their Democratic caucuses.

The state legislative debate last week over amending the Pre-Trial Fairness Act provisions within the controversial SAFE-T Act featured many of the same obfuscations and outright misinformation that characterized the fall campaign by Republicans and many of the same insufficient answers by Democrats. One of the problems that the super-majority Democrats have in both chambers is that when they know their bill is going to pass, they usually don’t take the Republicans’ objections seriously enough to fully engage with them. But on bills like this, misinformation can spread when points aren’t adequately rebutted.

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