Budget battle highlights rigged rules in Illinois’ legislative process

Illinoisans need structure and fairness in their state government. But in Springfield, the rules are often written by the controlling party to its own advantage.

Illinois is in the middle of one of the most contentious budget battles it has ever seen. Gov. Bruce Rauner is attempting to negotiate his first budget – one that would go a long way toward restoring freedom and fairness back to the state’s middle class.

However, it appears the majority party is in no mood to negotiate, as Democrats in the Illinois House and Senate have once again crafted a budget that spends more than the state earns. This time the shortfall is nearly $4 billion.

In addition to a truly balanced budget, Illinoisans need structure and fairness in their state government. But in Springfield, the rules are often written by the controlling party to its own advantage.

One of the first things you learn as a freshman member of the Illinois General Assembly is how a bill is made into law. The process is controlled by a set of adopted rules. Rules determine the makeup of the governing body’s organizational structure – the election of the speaker and minority leader, for example. Rules also determine how bills are introduced, processed and what committees are formed.

When a bill is written, it heads to a committee with “rules” in the title. The Rules Committee decides whether a bill can be moved to a committee for the next step: a hearing. An education bill most likely would be heard in the Education Committee, for instance. The Rules Committee is made of five appointed members, three from the majority party and two from the minority party.

In other words, the majority party has total control over which bills can be vetted and to what committee they will be assigned for a hearing.

That process is very much abused. In my tenure in the Illinois House of Representatives, I introduced many bills that died because they could not get out of the Rules Committee, or were assigned to a committee where I knew the members would vote “no.”

Rules also determine the schedule for legislative deadlines. If you miss the deadline, your bill is dead and you have to try again next year.

But for some lawmakers, the rules don’t work that way. You can take another lawmaker’s bill, strip it of its language and replace it with entirely new language in the form of an amendment to the bill. Now you have a piece of legislation that is titled one way, but many times reads differently. This can make it nearly impossible for an average citizen to identify the bill in question, raising serious transparency concerns.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle can take advantage of this. But whether a bill’s purpose is transparent or not, the rules are set up so that only Illinois’ majority party can move it through the legislative process.

The majority party in the General Assembly controls the method for manufacturing legislation, and often games that process for its own political agenda. As the budget debate takes shape, Illinoisans should keep that in mind. The stage is constructed for one party only.