Rich MillerPat Quinn is the most popular Illinois governor in more than a decade.

A new statewide poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports found that Governor Quinn has a 61-percent job approval rating. The poll of 500 likely Illinois voters conducted on April 14 claims that Quinn's job-approval rating is five points higher than U.S. Senator Dick Durbin's 56-percent "favorable" rating, and six points lower than President Barack Obama's home state 67-percent job-approval rating. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.

Lisa MadiganBack in 2005, I asked House Speaker Michael Madigan why he didn't just run somebody against Governor Rod Blagojevich in the '06 Democratic primary if he was so upset at the way Blagojevich was running things.

"I did that once, and it led to 26 years of uninterrupted Republican rule," Madigan cracked.

In the early 1970s, a very young Representative Madigan was Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley's point man in the House against Daley's arch-nemesis, Democratic Governor Dan Walker. That legislative opposition led directly to Daley's forces beating Walker in the 1976 primary. Their candidate went on to lose to Republican Jim Thompson, and the GOP held onto the governor's job until Blagojevich won the 2002 campaign.

I told you that story to give you an idea how Madigan may be sizing up next year.

I've often said that I'm a reform agnostic.

It's not that I don't believe in good government. I do. Fervently.

And I most certainly don't believe as some do that voters should be given the sole responsibility to weed out the crooks and con artists. "Let the buyer beware" just isn't good enough. Rod Blagojevich's two consecutive gubernatorial campaign wins and George Ryan's earlier win proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that voters simply aren't able to handle this task on their own.

So we do need some "consumer protection" laws in Illinois. But we should also keep some important points in mind.

Whither Reform?

Both Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and House Speaker Michael Madigan have said that they'd like to see Illinois politics and government cleaned up before any deficit-closing tax increases are debated.

It's doubtful, of course, that the two men are talking about the same sort of cleanup - with Madigan coming from the old school and Quinn being the reformer for several decades.

Madigan mentioned two targets for reform the other day when talking to public television: the pension systems and the state's Purchasing Act. He didn't elaborate much. A spokesperson said ideas are currently being developed, but Madigan does want some of the state's purchasing reforms from a few years ago applied to the state pension systems.

Quinn, meanwhile, has pushed binding public referenda, campaign-contribution limits, and a whole host of other ideas that are never very popular in Springfield. Good-government groups and some newspapers have made contribution caps their top priority, partly because disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich's campaign funding apparatus was so obscene.

So, where does it go from here?

Pat QuinnThe biggest problem with passing Governor Pat Quinn's tax-hike and budget proposals is not that almost every Statehouse interest group opposes them.

The Illinois Federation of Teachers, for instance, sent out a statement before Quinn had even finished his budget address to say that any state legislator who votes for the governor's proposed "pension cuts" would automatically lose the union's endorsement.

State workers are spitting mad about paying more into the pension plan and being forced to take unpaid days off.

Business groups are beside themselves about the tax hikes.

Mayors hate the idea that they won't get their usual 10-percent slice of Quinn's proposed income-tax increase.

These are very serious, almost insurmountable obstacles, of course. But they're not the worst.

The biggest hurdle, by far, is that the governor focused on a problem that he alone wants to deal with, but that nobody else really cares about.

The governor, you already know, wants to raise the state's personal income tax rate from 3 percent to 4.5 percent, but also triple the $2,000 personal exemption so that almost 5 million people will get a tax cut or pay no extra taxes. Quinn claims this is about "tax fairness" as much as it is about raising new money to close the state's $11.5-billion budget deficit.

But, seriously, when was the last time you heard anybody complain about the Illinois income tax?

At just 3 percent, Illinois has the lowest flat tax in the nation. Quinn has pushed this tax-fairness idea for decades, but almost nobody else has. Tripling the personal exemption is just not something that any legislator has ever cared much about.

Since the governor's tax proposal has no real constituency within the General Assembly, he starts out with almost no legislative allies.

Just about every member of the Illinois General Assembly has fervently campaigned to reduce the property-tax burden and increase spending for schools. Also, suburban Cook County and Chicago legislators are hearing loud and constant screams of anger from their voters about their region's super-high sales tax.

There are some very angry everyday people demanding a solution to these festering problems. Yet Quinn's budget and tax-hike proposals do nothing about any of them.

In fact, the governor's proposals may be making the political situation for incumbent legislators far worse than they would be with a more "normal" tax hike and budget fix.

For one, the governor has proposed a relatively tiny education-spending increase. That pretty much guarantees some local school districts, which are also experiencing serious problems in this economy, will have to raise property taxes even higher.

Local governments are strapped in this economy as well and are dying for money. Without help from the state via their usual share of the income-tax hike, they may also have to raise sales or property taxes.

Quinn wants to expand the state sales tax to cover items such as grooming and hygiene products, sweetened tea, and coffee drinks that are currently exempted from the full sales tax rate. That's not really a big thing, but in this sort of environment it could make for big headlines.

And, not surprisingly, legislators aren't particularly thrilled with voting for Quinn's 50-percent income-tax hike and still having to vote for well over a billion dollars in state budget cuts. Quinn's tax-exemption reform proposal took a tax hike that could've raised almost $6 billion down to only about $2.5 billion.

The governor said on Friday that he hoped he could convince the business lobby to support his tax hike by showing them how he's forcing teachers and state workers to pay more into the pension systems. But it's the height of folly to assume that the business lobby will ever get behind a tax hike.

The only groups that can be counted on to reliably support tax hikes are the very groups that Quinn has gone out of his way to whack. Public-school teachers, state workers, and people such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley are absolutely key, and all of them are firmly in the "no" category.

I still think there will be a state tax increase in our near future. I just don't think yet that it'll be this one. Quinn has a horrific fight ahead of him.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and TheCapitolFaxBlog.com.

Bill Brady

Republican State Senator Bill Brady kicked off his new gubernatorial campaign the other day by claiming that Illinois' horrific budget deficit can be "managed." But a new report by the governor's office makes that claim even less realistic that it already was.

As you already know, Democratic Comptroller Dan Hynes has estimated the state's budget deficit could reach $9 billion next fiscal year, not including aid from the federal stimulus package. We can toss those numbers out the window now, but this is all Brady had to go on when he announced his campaign, so let's look at it anyway.

Brady told WGN Radio the day before his official campaign kickoff that the budget deficit was about $4 billion to $5 billion "on an annual basis." That's pretty much exactly what Comptroller Hynes projected. Hynes included $4 billion or so in unpaid bills from this fiscal year in his $9-billion deficit projection for next fiscal year, which begins July 1.

But Brady insisted that the budget deficit could be managed. "The first thing we need to do is to deal with that $4- to $5-billion deficit. And you can manage that. When you've got a $53-plus-billion budget, you need to manage it," Brady said.

Mike QuigleyCan the votes of a handful of Chicago and Cook County residents change Illinois? We are about to find out.

Winning 22 percent of the vote is not usually considered an overwhelming mandate, but winners write the history books. And Democrat Mike Quigley's congressional-primary victory last week is already being touted as an occasion worthy of at least a chapter.

Cook County Commissioner Quigley defeated 11 candidates, including two state legislators, to win the Fifth Congressional District special primary election last Tuesday with 12,100 votes. His smart, well-managed campaign was vastly outspent by his top two opponents.

Quigley successfully tapped into rising voter anger in the wake of Rod Blagojevich's arrest, Roland Burris' U.S. Senate appointment and, most importantly, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger's tax hikes and innumerable missteps.

Every two years, the Illinois Republican Party tears itself apart over a piece of legislation that supposedly would allow rank-and-file party members to have more say in party affairs This year may be worse than usual, however.

Senate Bill 600, sponsored by Senator Chris Lauzen (R-Aurora), would stop the practice of allowing Republican township, ward, and precinct committee members to elect the state central committee. The bill would instead force the GOP to adopt the same rules as the Democrats and allow primary voters to elect the state central committee.

Most people don't care about this, and I can understand if you're with them. But since this tiny little change has been one of the most divisive issues in the Illinois GOP's recent history, it's worth a closer look.

Rich MillerThe nasty and brutish Statehouse war is officially over for everyone but House Speaker Michael Madigan.

miller.jpgGovernor Pat Quinn's choice of Jerry Stermer as his new chief of staff tells us a lot about what's going to happen soon.

As the head of the advocacy group Voices for Illinois Children for the past 22 years, Stermer has been a tireless advocate for progressive tax reform and expansion of human-services and education programs.

If this were anybody else working for any other governor, you might think that Stermer would be the perfect choice to deliver the bad news to Medicaid providers, education lobbyists, and liberals of all stripes that their agenda just wasn't affordable in the face of Illinois' horrific budget-deficit mess. But almost nobody believes that will be Stermer's role.

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