What is shaping up to be the most challenging year of Gov. JB Pritzker’s tenure began in Springfield with an inauspicious fight between the governor and a key leader in his own party, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch.
Earlier this week, Welch embarrassed Pritzker by squashing a bill the governor had made a high priority; specifically, to bar the sale of potent gummies infused with synthetic THC to children. This page thought, and thinks, the governor was right and Welch was dead wrong on that issue. But that’s not the only thing that worries us.
The outcome of this legislative effort augurs poorly for sensible solutions to the $3.2 billion budget deficit Pritzker and lawmakers face later this year. As we write, much remains murky about how and why Welch wouldn’t allow a vote on the Senate-passed hemp-industry bill Pritzker had personally lobbied House Democrats to support. But one of the plausible explanations we saw was that there weren’t 60 Democrats in favor, which fell below an informal internal threshold Welch purportedly has established for bringing legislation to the House floor.
Operating with a veto-proof majority of 78 Democrats in the 118-member chamber, Welch reportedly requires that any bill getting a floor vote must be able to pass with only Democratic votes even if (as was certainly the case with the hemp bill) it would easily win approval on a bipartisan basis.
Readers might recall a Republican version of this approach in Washington, D.C., dubbed after former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the Illinois congressman who after leaving office was convicted of paying a sexual-abuse victim for his silence and spent 13 months in federal prison. The “Hastert rule” informally demanded backing from “a majority of the majority” — that is, support within the GOP caucus — before a bill could get a floor vote.
That standard is far less strict than Welch’s, which effectively gives as few as 19 Democrats veto power over any state legislation. The hemp bill clearly would have passed under a Democratic version of the Hastert rule, according to a fuming Pritzker, who asserted after Welch’s maneuver that a majority of House Democrats supported his bill.
The Welch rule — we should give it a name, right? — needlessly opens the door to all kinds of chicanery. For example, it allows an industry bent on stopping needed reform, like the hemp sellers, to concentrate heavy donations on relatively few Democratic members who in turn keep legislation bottled up.
This sort of dynamic is the last thing that should be introduced to a state government whose long-term House leader, Michael Madigan, has been sitting for weeks in a federal courtroom fighting corruption and conspiracy charges. It’s hard enough to keep Illinois government clean without providing positive inducements for corrupt dealings.
The Welch rule also is particularly counterproductive right now, given where the state finds itself. Illinoisans from Chicago to Cairo are showing growing signs of tax fatigue, bordering on anger. Closing a multibillion-dollar budget gap will demand significant cost-cutting, if a tax revolt little more than a year before voters go back to the polls is to be avoided.
Can Welch find at least 60 of 78 Democratic House members to support meaningful spending reductions? For the sake of the state, we hope so but hope is not a plan. A realistic budget that doesn’t continue to rely mainly on more taxes and fees from Illinois residents and businesses likely will require Republican involvement and support this year. Adhering to this absurd rule requiring a three-quarters supermajority of Democrats in order to act would be foolhardy in the extreme.
Of course, in the Pritzker era, state budgets largely have been balanced with the aid of substantial federal pandemic largesse, enabling hefty spending increases. Republicans never supported those plans, understandably, and so Welch had no choice but to rely exclusively on his own caucus for those votes.
Welch’s leadership of the House since succeeding the scandal-tarred Madigan has been shaky in numerous instances. He nearly fumbled last year’s budget vote, requiring House Democrats to suspend their own rules to approve the measure with the thinnest of margins on a third try after 4 a.m. His office has seen an unusual amount of turnover of senior staff. And just this week, Pritzker openly criticized Welch after the governor said the speaker did nothing to stop more than one of his members from berating and verbally abusing staff experts from the governor’s administration called in to explain the hemp issues to the Democratic Caucus.
As the 104th General Assembly opened Wednesday, with all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds the occasion, Welch addressed the chamber, offering a series of commitments “I make to every member — whether Democrat or Republican — because I am not speaker of the Democrats but speaker of the House.”
Continuing to give fewer than two dozen Democrats veto power over the state’s direction frankly belies those words. In this upcoming moment of truth for Illinois, the speaker has the opportunity to give power to that rhetoric, which many on the GOP side don’t believe for a minute. But it’s just hot air if the Welch rule remains in effect.
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