Last May, several Illinois House Democrats complained bitterly that their mass-transit negotiators were ignored and even shut out by the Senate Democratic mass-transit negotiators. The House members had a point. The Senate passed a bill, which was an almost purely Senate Democratic creation. They literally gave the House a “take it or leave it, but you have to decide right now” moment during the final minutes of the spring legislative session.

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights held a statehouse lobby day last week to push its far-reaching veto-session agenda. Included in the coalition’s agenda are things like putting strict limits on executing civil-immigration warrants in state courthouses. That would likely be challenged in court, but there is some common-law precedent going back to the English court system, so we’ll see.

The announcement last week that the Illinois AFL-CIO was withdrawing from the “agreed-bill process” at least forty years after its inception took almost everyone by surprise, but nobody was really shocked. For years, whenever the group engaged in carefully-constructed negotiations with business interests on workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, labor leaders would grumble privately that most other states don’t have a similar process.

Jim Edgar ran a brilliant campaign for governor in 1990. He set the template for every winning statewide race since then by focusing on the importance of independent suburban women. The Republican Edgar defeated a Catholic Democrat – Neil Hartigan – in that race, with a boost from the National Abortion Rights Action League’s endorsement. That endorsement most definitely helped him with suburban women, who were just starting to lean Democratic.