A defeated state House Democrat says his party has a problem.

Democrats in the Illinois House have had it pretty easy in recent years courtesy of a comfortable arrangement with House Speaker Michael Madigan.

They pledge their votes to him anytime Madigan needs them, and he protects them from defeat at the polls. Using gerrymandered districts and almost unlimited campaign funds from his supporters in organized labor and trial lawyer organizations, Madigan has been able to keep up his end of the bargain.

Illinois begins the new year, as it did last year, without a state budget in place.

That means social service agencies, universities and others that rely on state funding are not getting paid. All this as the state’s backlog of bills stands at $11 billion – and growing. How much more of this dysfunction can the state take? We sat down with Governor Bruce Rauner on Wednesday for some answers.

The new year began with Illinois in a familiar place: no state budget, and no signs of a compromise soon. So what can we expect when politicians head to Springfield next week?

Governor Bruce Rauner spoke on-camera to ABC7 for about 10 minutes in his office on Wednesday. No topic was off limits. He discussed the state’s budget crisis, his relationship with House Speaker Michael Madigan, and what grade he would give himself as governor so far.

The governor and state lawmakers will be back in Springfield on Monday.

A new General Assembly is about to be sworn in, but before that, the outgoing class of legislators still have a few days to finish up its remaining business. Could a budget pass in that so-called lame duck session? And are Democrats any more willing to work with the governor?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s law department again has been sanctioned for withholding records involving a fatal police shooting, marking the eighth time in recent years a federal judge has formally punished the city for failing to turn over potential evidence in a police misconduct lawsuit.

U.S. District Court Judge Joan Gottschall on Tuesday ruled that the city acted in “bad faith” when it ignored a court order and made little effort to provide documents to the lawyer for the family of 20-year-old Divonte Young, who was shot and killed by an officer in 2012.

Mike Shields is trying to reclaim his job as president of the Fraternal Order of Police — three years after being suspended for making the explosive charge that two police contracts handed down by an independent arbitrator had been “rigged” in the city’s favor.

With homicides surging, police activity plummeting and morale at rock bottom, Shields said Chicago Police officers need a union that has “their back” at a time when local politicians don’t.

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner will not attend the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump in Washington, D.C.

Inaugurations typically are opportunities for members of the winning party to celebrate claiming the White House while hobnobbing and raising money for campaigns. But Rauner, already in campaign mode for his 2018 re-election bid, has been consumed with a battle here at home as he tries to sway public opinion in his corner during a prolonged budget stalemate with Democrats who control the General Assembly.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is bracing for the Justice Department to release – before President Barack Obama leaves office Jan. 20 — findings from its probe of the Chicago Police Department triggered by the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.

With only days left for the Obama Justice Department, it is highly unlikely the probe will conclude with a signed-and-completed federal court consent decree outlining mandated changes in police practices, sources told the Sun-Times.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel opted Wednesday not to get into a war of words over former police Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s comments to “60 Minutes” that the Police Department is in crisis and the city in a “state of lawlessness.”

McCarthy, who was fired by Emanuel in late 2015 in the aftermath of the release of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video that roiled the city, was featured prominently on a segment that aired Sunday on the CBS news show about Chicago’s soaring homicide numbers.

Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson on Wednesday emphatically denied that he’s presiding over a police department “in crisis” in a city “reaching a state of lawlessness” as his predecessor Garry McCarthy claimed on national television.

“Superintendent McCarthy put a lot of good things in place that we’re still utilizing, and he served the city well. But I disagree with characterizing us as a department in crisis because we’re not,” Johnson said after joining Mayor Rahm Emanuel at police headquarters to welcome 135 newly promoted detectives.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday he “wasn’t bragging” as much as he was “acknowledging how we stabilized” skyrocketing health care costs in a 2015 email exchange that has infuriated retired city employees stripped of their 55 percent health care subsidy.

“You can call what I did heartless. We worked it through over a three-year period. We avoided raising taxes. And we avoided cutting basic neighborhood services. And we still met the objective of providing and giving people health care,” the mayor said.

Already facing the prospect of owing nearly $5 million in an ongoing whistleblower case, Chicago State University has agreed to pay more than $1 million to end a separate lawsuit brought by another former high-ranking administrator.

The latest $1.3 million settlement marks the second time in recent years that the university has either lost or settled costly disputes by former employees who claimed they were fired after reporting alleged misconduct by the school’s former president, Wayne Watson.

With delays in state payments to health care providers at record levels, a Springfield medical group has begun to require patients insured by the state to pay half of their expected surgery bills up front before any work takes place.

The requirement from the Orthopedic Center of Illinois comes at a time when payments for the care of state workers, retirees and dependents insured through the State Employees’ Group Insurance Program total $3.66 billion and are overdue 18 months or more.

Pharmaceuticals are an important element of American health care, and one that changes all the time. With dozens of new drugs approved each year by the Food and Drug Administration, keeping up with them is a challenge. So drug companies employ representatives to visit physicians, explain the uses of their products and provide samples.

For doctors, this can be a helpful service or a nuisance. They can allow such visits or not. They can take and dispense the samples or not. They can choose to prescribe the pills or not (the reps don’t actually sell drugs, a task assigned to pharmacies). More than half of physicians tightly restrict access by such representatives, according to the website Fierce Pharma.

Heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar could move production out of a west suburban plant at a cost of 800 local jobs, the company announced Wednesday.

Peoria-based Caterpillar has faced four years of declining revenue and expects that to continue in 2017, spokeswoman Corrie Scott said. The lower demand has forced Caterpillar to re-evaluate manufacturing at the Aurora plant, which employs about 800 production workers.

Ford Motor Co. will make a new hybrid police vehicle in Chicago, one of 13 new electrified vehicles it plans to roll out over the next five years.

The “pursuit-rated” hybrid will be made at the company’s Torrence Avenue plant. The hybrid and another new police vehicle will be outfitted with police equipment at another Ford operation on the South Side.

Some 1.2 million motorists have been sent notices from the city of Chicago offering an “additional opportunity” to contest red-light and speed-camera tickets that some of them paid as long as seven years ago.

What the notices don’t explain is that it’s actually the city that is trying to give itself the “additional opportunity” — to reinforce its claim to millions of dollars in fines and penalties that it is in danger of having to repay those vehicle owners.

Voters in McHenry and Kane counties will get an opportunity to tell local governments on April 4 what they already know but may not take seriously enough – that they’re tired of their high property taxes continuing to increase.