Editorial: As campaign swallows budget crisis, lawmakers must step up

The 2018 gubernatorial campaign season has begun, which means whatever hope there is of solving Illinois budgetary issues before next year's election will not likely be coming from the party leadership.

The Democrats will say Gov. Bruce Rauner has failed to do anything substantive in two years. Rauner will make the same claim of the Democratic leaders. The rest of us will be tempted to lapse into despair that the brakes will be stuck on Illinois government for another year and a half.

The only glimmer of light - and it is admittedly faint - lies with legislators, the rank and file who are elected promising to enact change in Springfield, but who too often get absorbed into the herd soon after they are sworn in, scarcely to be heard from again.

The leaders won't solve this issue. The legislators must.

That state representatives and senators are beginning to recognize this has been evident for a few months. The best example so far is the so-called Grand Bargain, the bipartisan compromise budget bill hammered out by Illinois Senate President John Cullerton and Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno.

There were problems with the Cullerton/Radogno plan and progress on it has stalled, but it's a starting point for compromise. As there will be problems with every proposal.

Case in point, the so-called "Comeback Agenda," a five-point plan promoted by a group of House Democrats that did more to lay out a 2018 legislative campaign strategy than provide realistic hope for budget compromise. Other plans have been proposed outside the legislature, and who knows how many others will emerge, as individual Democratic and Republican lawmakers feel the public's frustration with the wretched politics that have brought us to this point and begin offering their own solutions.

Which will be fine. It will tell party leaders that lawmakers on the floor are as fed up with inaction as the public and are ready to respond to the needs of the state if the leaders won't.

A proposal that bears the imprint of either party is likely dead on arrival - so heavily will it bear the weight of partisanship. Still, If those partisan proposals eventually make compromise look more palatable by comparison, the time spent on them won't be entirely in vain.

To Illinois legislators, especially those from the suburbs in both parties, we say: The time is past to sit back and wait for something to vote on.

Defy your leadership. Keep working on the existing bargain or create something new. The stack of unpaid bills in Illinois could hit $15 billion by midsummer, and the human toll is growing by the day. Someone must step up and rise above politics to meet that challenge.