Back to bad news, from this morning's Capital Fax:
"As you saw on the blog early yesterday afternoon, Gov. Bruce Rauner has issued a new threat in his ever-escalating war against House Speaker Michael Madigan, who Rauner says is demanding yet another stopgap spending plan: If Madigan wants a stopgap budget to close out this fiscal year then Rauner will need term limits and a permanent property tax freeze.
Speaker Madigan's spokesman denied yesterday that Madigan had suggested another stopgap spending plan. But more spending without a "lame duck Rauner tax hike" would certainly seem to suggest that's what is going on.
The Democrats must feel like they're living in one of those old James Bond movies, where the villain demands an impossible ransom or he'll blow up the world. I mean, a permanent property tax freeze and term limits for a six-month stopgap? Slightly excessive perhaps?
Then again, this state has had two years of stopgap budgets with no end in sight. Billions of dollars in unpaid bills are piling up, the six-month appropriation for most of the budget expires at the end of December and the voters just approved a constitutional amendment barring any further attempts to dip into the state's fat transportation funds for non-transportation purposes, so more hellish crises are literally just around the fiscal corner. We simply can't go on like this. Somebody's got to force the issue.
And the prospect of no stopgap is grim. Chicago State University just got a few million dollars from the Illinois Board of Higher Education to tide it over to next spring, but that's probably nowhere near enough cash. Northeastern Illinois University, also in Chicago, got nothing from the IBHE, and neither did the City Colleges system."
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