State budget process not entirely flawed

A blatant violation of constitutional duty or just a return to the good old days? That question has arisen now that the Illinois legislature has handed Gov. Rod Blagojevich a $59 billion budget that the governor says is out of balance by $2.1 billion.

Doing so allowed the General Assembly to adjourn as scheduled Saturday, and left it up to the governor to make the cuts necessary to balance the budget. To us, this sounds like a formula for another summer of discontent as the governor and legislative leaders (provided, of course, that House Speaker Michael Madigan participates) try to hammer out a budget...

Blagojevich appeared on a Chicago radio show Tuesday to invite the legislative leaders to join him as he works on the budget they sent him Saturday.

Yet not everyone sees the current budget process as entirely flawed. Rep. Gary Hannig of Litchfield, the House Democrats' lead budget negotiator, characterized it not as a breakdown of an airtight system, but as a return to the budget process of a few decades ago. As reported Tuesday by State Journal-Register political writer Bernard Schoenburg, Hannig said it was common, when he first served in the House in 1979, for the legislature to craft the budget, which the governor would amend by line-item veto.

"If you go back and look at those days, you will see that veto sessions had a lot of budget items ... and a lot of override efforts," Hannig said.

That was the era of Gov. Jim Thompson, a Republican who worked with Democrat-controlled legislatures for most of his time in office. Thompson's successor, Gov. Jim Edgar, who had the luxury of Republican legislatures for two years beginning in 1995, used the model of a collaborative budget created by the legislature and the governor, Hannig said.

Call us old-fashioned, but we much prefer the 1995 model to the 2007 and 2008 versions. In the area of the state budget, consider us strict constructionists. We don't see much wiggle room in Article 8, section 2 of the Illinois Constitution: "The General Assembly by law shall make appropriations for all expenditures of public funds by the State. Appropriations for a fiscal year shall not exceed funds estimated by the General Assembly to be available during that year."