As I’ve been telling my newsletter subscribers for several weeks now, talks began in mid-May about a possible special state legislative session to address the abortion issue.

Senator Darren Bailey and House GOP Leader Jim Durkin in June 2020

“We're not the party of Trump,” Senate Republican Leader Dan McConchie told an interviewer a couple of months ago. “I'm in the Republican Party and the party of Lincoln. And at the end of the day, the important thing is that we're standing up for ideas and ideals and not a personality. And that is what the Republican Party has been about for decades and what I believe we're going to be going forward.”

The Illinois Republican Party has successfully avoided being dragged into the hard-right camp at the state level for decades. Those days may be over.

The state’s political world may have been shocked, but I doubt many in that world were surprised at the level of vitriol in Representative Sam Yingling (D-Grayslake)’s press release last week which claimed he’d been “attacked” by Governor JB Pritzker. Governor Pritzker’s “offense” was endorsing Representative Yingling’s Democratic primary opponent Mary Edly-Allen in the race to replace retiring state Senator Melinda Bush (D-Grayslake).

The long Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer and is perhaps best known in Chicago as the beginning of its long, hot season of gun violence. The morning-after news coverage typically notes that the holiday “was the most violent weekend of the year so far,” or some such thing. You’ve probably seen the polling, which shows crime isn’t the super-hot political issue it’s often portrayed to be. But don’t kid yourself. It’s still high enough on voters’ lists to make a difference, usually coming in second-place behind economic issues.

Illinois peaked at 27 U.S. House seats after the 1910 Census and subsequent reapportionment. That lasted until the 1940 Census, when Illinois dropped to 26 seats in Congress. We’ve been steadily losing ground ever since. It’s not that we lost population, it’s that other states in the West and the South grew much faster. California had just eleven congressional districts as a result of the 1910 Census. It now has 53.

Gubernatorial candidate Richard Irvin has spent tens of millions of billionaire Ken Griffin’s dollars introducing himself to Republican primary voters. Yet, a recent poll taken for WGN TV by Emerson College Polling shows he’s leading Senator Darren Bailey by just four percentage points, 24-20, with nineteen percent split between the other four candidates and undecideds “leading” with 37 percent.

Almost every weekday since the beginning of February, the Richard Irvin campaign has sent at least one press release to reporters about a host of issues, from crime to taxes to corruption to former House Speaker Michael Madigan to, well, you name it. Last week, however, the Irvin campaign was conspicuously silent for 24 hours.

I’ve mentioned before that House Speaker Chris Welch has said since the day he was elected to his chamber’s top job last year that he is fully committed to protecting all of his incumbents, whether in the primary or in the general election. That wasn’t always the case with his predecessor, House Speaker Michael Madigan.

The Illinois Senate adjourned its session April 9 just after 3 o’clock in the morning. The House adjourned about three hours later, as the sun was coming up. This wasn’t the first time that the chambers worked into the wee smalls to finish their work, including a budget, and it probably won’t be the last, but it’s getting to be a bit much. Senate President Don Harmon told me afterward that, in the future, he would like to “avoid” adjourning sessions that late.

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