Instead of “shaking up” Springfield as he promised four years ago, Gov. Bruce Rauner took the final step Monday to acclimating to the Illinois political culture.
He went along to get along.
On Monday, flanked by a bipartisan assortment of lawmakers, Rauner signed a budget that is likely somewhere between $600 million and $1.5 billion out of balance.
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Instead of “shaking up” Springfield as he promised four years ago, Gov. Bruce Rauner took the final step Monday to acclimating to the Illinois political culture.
He went along to get along.
On Monday, flanked by a bipartisan assortment of lawmakers, Rauner signed a budget that is likely somewhere between $600 million and $1.5 billion out of balance.
Nothing unusual there. That’s the way Illinois has been doing business for decades — except for that awful two-and-one-half years when it went without a budget. And business as usual is why the state is broke.
The legislative process is supposed to be transparent. But when it comes to the state budget, it rarely is.
During the waning days of the legislative session, caucus leaders filed into a closed room and negotiated with the governor. Once a budget agreement was reached behind those locked doors, Senators found themselves voting on the 1,245-page measure a few hours later.
Think any of them knew exactly what they were voting on? No way.
Is this unusual in Springfield? No. But it has never served the public well.
And Bruce Rauner has done little to reform the process.
Taxpayers and bondholders deserve to know how our money is being spent. But the budget document is so opaque it is often hard to discern whether major new spending initiatives have been slipped into the spending plan.