Call, write, vote: But, above all, finish the job

Getting you information is our job. Doing something with it is yours. Nowhere is this generally unspoken compact between a newspaper and its readers more apparent than in the frustrating annual theater known as "end of session" playing out this week in Springfield.

For months, the Daily Herald and other media around the state have been reporting on two concurrent crises in Illinois - the looming $5 billion - no, $9 billion - no, $12 billion - budget deficit and the ever-present menace of corruption in state government. We, like many of you, have clamored for action and for change.

And look where we are today, just three days from the date when the legislative session is due to conclude: On the budget, Democrats are wheeling and dealing to try to find Republicans to support an income tax increase; on corruption, lawmakers are still waffling over most of the three dozen specific proposals presented by a blue-ribbon panel - to the point that there are serious questions whether key ideas will ever see an actual vote.

It would be wrong to say that lawmakers have done nothing on ethics this session. If nothing else, they rid us of the previous governor, although one may point out that many of those who voted to remove Rod Blagojevich were well aware of his ethics problems during the 2006 election campaign during which they supported him.

More to the point, though, they've done some things to change the climate that allowed the types of abuses that occurred under Blagojevich's watch. They've put in place a system to sweep clean every political hire made by the previous governor and his predecessor, the imprisoned George Ryan. They've changed the way the state buys goods and services to provide more oversight and make it tougher for politicians to steer contracts to friends, families or donors. They've ordered state contracts and jobs to be put online where anyone can see who's getting what.

These are valuable steps, but if they are part of, as House Speaker Michael Madigan dubbed them, "the most significant and far-reaching government reform package that has been enacted in several years," that's only because nothing has been done for so long. They remain far from satisfying. Indeed, even as some Madigan aide was clacking out that phrase on a Capitol keyboard, the speaker's staff was circulating Freedom of Information legislation that ran patently counter to the suggestions of the reform commission and actually made the state's anemic open-government laws worse. The staff would later say that that's how government is done and point to improvements that have come in the interim. But significant reforms continue to founder, and legislative leaders would have us believe our outrage about that is all due to naiveté. We outsiders just don't understand "how things are done."

Hardly.

We are watching the process play out with all its hideous familiarity. What we see are not conscientious civil servants eager to accomplish something but calculating politicians hiding behind a system to which they claim an exclusive understanding - or, hardly better, timid lawmakers hiding behind leadership over which they claim to hold no sway.

When we published last week an informal survey of where suburban lawmakers stand on key ethics issues, we wanted to be sure to have them on record when it came time for a vote. Ironically, they may now use the survey to suggest support for measures they never really have to vote on.

They may, that is, unless you take the process to its next level. We can tell the stories of what happens in Springfield. We can exhort you to outrage on our editorial page. The next step is yours. We hope we've done our part sufficiently well that you can use your remaining tools - the telephone, your memory and the ballot box - to finish the job.