Illinois Media: “Doing Everything We Can to Blame the GOP for the Democrats Fiscal Mess”

As President Reagan said to Carter, “There you go, again.”

“After watching from the sidelines for months, Republican lawmakers now enjoy new power over the state’s budget mess, and they’re using it to push doggedly for major changes in government spending.

They want controls on fast-rising health-care and retirement costs, two politically sensitive and financially complex issues that can’t be resolved quickly. To get them, Republicans are willing to delay budget decisions by passing a temporary spending plan to keep government operating while negotiations continue.

The risk for Republicans is that they’ll be tangled up in a budget crisis that, so far, has largely been the responsibility of the Democratic majority.

Even if they get many of the changes they want, Republicans could share in the blame if the stalemate drags on all summer and ultimately produces an unpopular tax increase and painful service cuts.”

The standard line coming from Springfield is that an unpopular tax increase and painful cuts are necessary to fix the budget.  In his weekly column Rich Miller states, “Once again, pretty much everybody at the Statehouse knows that taxes will have to rise in order to balance this massively out-of-whack budget.”  Miller’s comment too, is about holding Republican candidates feet to the fire.

And it’s no stretch for me to state that just about everyone knows that spending will be cut, too.  Gov. Quinn offered a few — just a few in his budget address.   Yet, this inevitable conclusion is that it’s all the GOP’s fault.

The Democrats have a veto-proof majority in the Senate.  They are one vote short of a veto-proof majority in the House.  They hold elected constitutional office in the state.  Therefore, if anything goes wrong, blame the Republicans.  Get it?

Of course on any other occasion all you hear from the press is how Republicans don’t matter in Illinois.

In the end, the voters will determine who gets the blame.  And they rarely — if ever — blame the party that’s in power.  The only way that the GOP can screw this up is by believing what the press and the Democrats are telling them.  The regrettable truth, is that some undoubtedly will believe them.