From the Chicago Tribune

Get just one thing right
June 2, 2008
Find the logic here:
The people who run the Illinois legislature passed a budget over the weekend and largely ignored everything Gov. Rod Blagojevich wanted. No surprise there. It was clear way back in February, when the governor served up his annual budget address, that he wasn't going to be a factor this year. When nobody trusts you—nobody trusts you.
But in passing a budget that is way out of whack (lawmakers have pretty much admitted they don't have the money to pay for all the spending they approved) they have managed to make Blagojevich relevant again.
Suddenly, he's Mr. Responsibility. He has to use his veto power to balance this budget.
Imagine that. You have to go some to make Blagojevich look like the adult in Springfield. But that's what the legislature did.
There is some saving grace in what happened—rather, what didn't happen—down in the capital. The legislature didn't ram through who-knows-what's-really-in-here legislation to expand gambling and spend billions on roads and bridges.
So maybe everybody can take a deep breath and find out what mischief they were up to in the aborted gambling-infrastructure package.
There is one thing the legislature did do right. It sent to the governor an ethics bill.
Yes, you heard right. An ethics bill. In Illinois. Pick yourself off the floor. It's not law yet. The governor apparently has his own mischief in mind.
The bill would prohibit businesses seeking state contracts of $50,000 or more from making campaign contributions to the state officeholder who awards the contract, or to any candidate for that office.
It wouldn't stop contractors from giving money to state lawmakers, though legislative leaders have plenty of influence over who gets state business. It wouldn't stop contractors from giving money to political parties instead so that they could funnel it to the candidates, as Senate President Emil Jones kept repeating back when he thought he could stop his troops from passing the bill.
What it would do is help to shut down the opportunity for the governor to feast on pay-to-play politics. It would help to shut down the governor's prolific fundraising machine, and anyone who doesn't think that's a good idea hasn't been paying attention.
It's a good bill. But Blagojevich has been warming up a familiar ruse: He's been hinting that, instead of signing the bill, he'll send it back to lawmakers with "improvements" they won't be able to swallow. In Springfield, that's called "loving a bill to death."
It's transparently bogus.
This bill has been a long time coming. A version of it passed the House 116-0 way back in March 2007. The Senate sat on it for months and months while Senate leaders said they were working on how to "improve" it. That ruse was transparent too. The jaw-dropping testimony in the federal trial of Blagojevich crony Antoin "Tony" Rezko apparently convinced the Senate leaders it was time to quit stalling. They couldn't afford to be seen as protecting the pay-to-play culture on brazen display in the federal courthouse.
The Senate finally voted 56-0 on a barely tweaked version of the bill. The House quickly and overwhelmingly approved it.
So it's off to Blagojevich. There's no telling what sort of amendments the governor has up his sleeve this time. Remember how he made the mass transit bill "better" by insisting, completely out of left field, that senior citizens must be allowed to ride free? Lawmakers let him have his way because they didn't have the votes to override a veto.
But this time is different. Lawmakers have made an unusual public pledge to defeat any attempt by the governor to kill the bill with poisonous improvements. They have the votes to override any changes he makes.
Blagojevich could save himself some embarrassment—and maybe even regain some trust of Democrats and Republicans—if he would just sign the bill.
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