Time runs out on some tough issues

"I hope you all have a great summer."

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan bid his colleagues farewell with those words very early Monday morning as the legislature adjourned, having run out of time well before it ran out of critically important issues.

Take, for instance, Gov. Pat Quinn's famous pledge back in January to "fumigate" state government of employees hired or appointed by disgraced former governors George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich. The pests evoked by that much-quoted term still overrun the place. Quinn dawdled over his housecleaning chores, and a bill put forth by Madigan to fire 700 employees was pulled from consideration in the Senate hours before adjournment - four months after the idea was put on the table.

And then there's the state budget, a crucial bit of state business if ever there was one.

In a year that was supposed to be different, that was supposed to set real priorities for state funding, that was supposed to put politics aside, what do we get?

An eleventh-hour stopgap budget proposal with barely enough money to scrape by until the end of the year and no solution for a looming $12 billion two-year deficit. A chasm a mile wide between Quinn, pushing a 50 percent income-tax increase and unwilling to make further program cuts, and the majority of legislators who wouldn't vote for a tax increase.

If Madigan's parting words to his colleagues Monday conveyed a bit of exasperation, it's nothing compared with how the rest of us should feel.

With all of the talk of reform and change, the legislature locked itself into the usual process of negotiating the most critical state business in the last days and hours of the legislative session - with results not much different from a year ago, when lawmakers, unable to fill a budget hole, threw up their hands and sent a deficit budget to Blagojevich and told him to fix it.

Have a great summer, indeed.

It's hard to drum up any hope for the detente Quinn sought later on Monday, when he and legislative leaders met and promised that now - now that legislators would have to be called back into session, now that approval would require a 60 percent majority, not a simple majority - they'll genuinely work toward a real budget.

We challenge them to do so, to act with a sense of urgency but also to search again for spending cuts and government duplication rather than rushing with hands out to taxpayers.

Then, we challenge Quinn and the legislative leaders to make a real change and devise a process that removes these important decisions from the frenzy and exhaustion of the legislative session's last days.

Just imagine next year having a budget that legislators could read, digest and vote on well before the end-of-session deadline.

We in Illinois have been in limbo long enough.