Editorial: Munger's decision to withhold lawmakers' pay at least has symbolic value

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn's abortive attempt to break a legislative logjam by withholding lawmakers' pay didn't work in 2013, so it's not entirely clear how Republican Comptroller Leslie Munger's similar effort will succeed this spring.

But that doesn't mean the comptroller shouldn't give it a try anyway.

Munger's office plays a daily game of Pick a Priority to try to make the best use of the $100 million a day she gets to chip away at about $9 billion in backlogged and unpaid bills. And that doesn't take into account the looming $110 billion in unfunded pension liabilities facing the state. When you strip away all the zeros, she points out, that's like trying to pay $119,000 in bills on an income of $100 a day.

One can't overlook the fact that Munger is facing a challenge in November to keep her job, so it's not unreasonable to see a political motivation behind her decision to move legislators' wages to the back of the line for payouts. But it's also easy to understand her frustration. Most Illinoisans no doubt share it, even if they don't have to deal with the unmanageable numbers every day.

True, in the context of the comptroller's own analogy, the $1.3 million a month she's defraying equates to some fraction of a penny almost too complicated and minuscule to calculate. But that's not the point. She cannot balance the budget on the backs of lawmakers, but maybe she can coax the document out of them. At least that's the strategy.

Whether it can be effective is a bigger question. To some extent, thanks to the vagaries of Illinois politics, rank-and-file legislators are innocent bystanders in the high-stakes standoff between the Democratic legislative leaders and the Republican governor. But it's not unreasonable to hope that Munger's gambit will so pressure submissive lawmakers that they'll find the nerve to make some serious demands of their leaders.

We'll see what they're really serious about, of course, if any of them takes the issue to court in hopes of a ruling like that which stymied Quinn's 2013 effort. But even a court order wouldn't blunt the ultimate value of the comptroller's action, which is to put lawmakers on notice that they, all of them, are responsible for steadily increasing suffering caused by the cutbacks and closures at agencies that provide assistance to the most innocent, the most vulnerable and the hardest-hit victims of the budget impasse - the needy, the elderly and the disabled.

If state leaders can't provide the basic mechanism for managing the state, at least they'll get a taste of the pain their inaction is causing. And if that taste doesn't last, at least they'll get a message on where their interests stand - a message voters also should remember to reinforce at the polls next year.