Editorial: Focus on future to end 'business as usual' in Springfield

Think about this for a moment. It was Rod Blagojevich who made famous the pledge to end "business as usual in Springfield." That was 13 years ago, when the Democrat ran for his first term for Illinois governor.

We all know how that turned out.

Last February, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner declared in his 2015 budget that operating "business as usual" at the capitol would be "morally corrupt."

Yet, here we are. Seven months into the fiscal year with no serious spending plan - and the functions of government that are funded being supported at a previous year's pace that nearly everyone acknowledges is, well, unsupportable.

Perhaps worse, the way we got to this point is in classic in-your-face Illinois political style. The Democrat-controlled legislature produced a "budget" and handed it over to the governor. Unwilling either to satisfy the voters' much-expressed will for stronger spending controls or to take responsibility for whatever tax increase would be needed to balance their plan, they lay their incomplete homework on the governor's desk and invited him to assume all the political consequences of any cuts he desires.

Rauner chose not to play that game, and so in a perverse sense perhaps produced a crack in the "business as usual" paradigm - which - not to its credit, mind you - had always before produced a budget, if consistently late and cobbled together with smoke, mirrors and armloads of debt. Now, and let this also sink in for a moment, there is a distinct possibility Illinois will not have a 2015 fiscal year budget before the governor gives his budget address for 2016 in February.

The budget logjam appears to be constituted somewhere within the word "compromise," a term everyone in the debate loves as long as he or she can control the definition.

Gov. Rauner likes to tout his change-of-heart on legislation that disburses specifically-collected funds to certain agencies and governments money, and that was at least an olive branch. Though it hardly can be said that paying only a few agencies money that has little or nothing to do with the state's general spending plan qualifies as a budget compromise.

For their part, Democrats have repeatedly declared themselves prepared to compromise, even on portions of the Rauner Turnaround Agenda at the center of the budget fight, but one of their most-prominent moves in that regard was an unrealistic property-tax freeze that everyone recognized as -- good, ol' politics as usual -- a ploy to get Republicans on record voting against so-called property tax reform. Although Senate President John Cullerton has offered a more-sincere proposal that, whatever its shortcomings, can quality as true compromise, the Democrats' unyielding unbalanced 2015 budget is about as a strong a statement as one needs on their approach to making concessions.

Both sides, in short, are courting the advantage of being able to say "no" to any substantive proposals. In the imagery of Roosevelt University Professor Paul Green, quoted in a Daily Herald story today by Mike Riopell, they are more concerned with demonstrating strength than with solving problems.

"Whoever blinks, whoever's weak, the blame goes to that person," Green said.

That, folks, is the definition of Illinois business as usual in a nutshell, and it has got to change. It is not a weakness to acknowledge that Illinois' policies on worker's compensation, taxation, unemployment insurance and tort management are crippling the state's economy. It is not a weakness to acknowledge that the state has a responsibility to protect the working conditions and level-playing-field bargaining rights of public and private workers alike.

Last November, the online political forum "Capitol Fax" said of the budget fight, "It's been a long war. People refuse to get beyond the past. The only way this war's ever gonna end is if people start looking at the future. This shouldn't be allowed to last forever."

That's certainly true of the ongoing budget battle, and it's equally true of the broader challenge to change "business as usual" in Springfield. We hope both sides will show stronger commitment to that future in 2016.