POLITICS

Time for a reading on Illinois
at this millennial mile marker

by Charles N. Wheeler III

As the world, with much hoopla, prepares for a new millennium, the passing of a mere quarter century may seem like no big deal. After all, 25 years is but one-fortieth of a thousand-year span.

Still, as Illinois Issues marks its silver anniversary, it seems appropriate to take a moment to reflect on the march of Illinois government and politics the magazine has chronicled over the past quarter century. So, as someone who's taken a professional interest in the passing political scene in Illinois since 1970,1 offer these thoughts:

• Minnesota may have a real-life wrestler as its governor, but for rough- and-tumble, fiercely competitive partisan politics, few states are a match for Illinois. Here, even as rival candidates skewer each other in attack ads, voters regularly split their tickets, giving neither party total control.

Republicans now hold the Executive Mansion, as they have for 22 of the last 25 years, while Democrats run the House, as they have for all but four of the last 22 years; clearly, lllinoisans like split government. Many also love gossip about rifts within party ranks, although old-timers will tell you however strained relations are between Gov. George Ryan and Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood, both Republicans, they can't compare to the mutual loathing 25 years ago of Gov. Dan Walker and Lt. Gov. Neil Hartigan, both Democrats.

As Illinois Issues marks its silver anniversary, it seems appropriate to reflect on the march of Illinois government and politics the magazine has chronicled over the past quarter century.

Sectional rivalries are as intense as ever, meanwhile, with the suburbs becoming a major player as legislative power followed the growth that has made them the state's most populous region. In fact, more Senate and House districts now are rooted in suburbia than in either Chicago or in the 96 downstate counties.

• The General Assembly has become much more professional and seemingly much less civil over the last 25 years. As pay, retirement benefits and district office allowances have become more generous, the number of full-time legislators has grown. Staff and technology now give lawmakers greater access to the information they need to shape public policy than their counterparts had 25 years ago. Despite such advances perhaps because of them? the spirit of bipartisan camaraderie that typified legislative sessions a quarter century ago seems a fading shadow today. Now, too many lawmakers seem genuinely to dislike colleagues who don't share their partisan allegiance or political philosophy, and let these feelings color what should be issue- oriented debate. Maybe it's naive to expect legislators to be immune to the epidemic of rudeness that seems to have seized the nation, but the institution suffers from the illness.

• The most damaging wound to the body politic was self-inflicted: the ill-conceived Cutback Amendment of 1980. Enraged at a lame-duck legislative pay raise two years earlier, voters reduced the size of the House by one-third and eliminated multi- member districts and cumulative voting, a system that assured representation from all regions of the state in both parties' House caucuses.

Since then, only one Chicago district has voted Republican (albeit for eight consecutive elections), while no DuPage County district has sent a Democrat to the House (although Democratic success elsewhere has assured a strong suburban voice in House Democratic circles).

Single-member districts also helped nurture the explosive growth of campaign spending, as party leaders each election cycle pour more money into one-on-one races in targeted House districts. The old system may have produced a campaign arms race, too, but the logistics of four candidates typically vying for three seats would have made it much harder for the generals to call in poll-guided mass- mailings and precision TV attacks.

A more welcome change has been a legislature more representative of the diversity of Illinois' people. In 1974, there were only 11 women, 18 blacks and no Hispanics in the 236-member General Assembly. Today, the legislature's 177 members include 45 women, 23 blacks and six Hispanics.

• Some problems seem as intractable today as they were a quarter century ago.

42 / October 1999 Illinois Issues

In 1974, a new, year-old "Resource Equalizer" school aid formula was seen as a promising way to trim the huge financial disparity among public school districts, which was largely the result of the state's heavy reliance on property taxes to fund education. Some 25 years later, property-rich school districts still can spend $10,000 or $12,000 per student, while their poorer counterparts make do with the $4,235 per pupil in state and local resources guaranteed under a 1997 school funding agreement. And statewide taxes still pay only about one-third of the bill for elementary and secondary education.

In the last 25 years, meanwhile, the state has built 18 adult prisons to house an inmate population that has mushroomed in response to passage of politically popular "get-tough-on- crime" legislation. Yet prisons today are more crowded than they were when the state started its building binge, while the correction department's budget has increased almost 15-fold, three times the growth rate of the total state budget.

Our system of representative government generally serves its people well, but it would do much better if everyday citizens became more deeply engaged in public life.

Blue-ribbon panels have offered sound recommendations to deal with both school funding and prison crowding, but the state's elected leaders have lacked the political will to implement them.

• Economic and technological changes, meanwhile, are raising a host of new questions that hardly could have been imagined 25 years ago. Huge factory farms housing tens of thousands of hogs? Insurance companies rationing health care? Scientists making exact copies of living things from a single cell? A worldwide computer network that can bring into your home both the treasures of the Vatican Library and the most vile pornography imaginable? Such are the new issues confronting today's policy-makers.

And this final observation: Our system of representative government generally serves its people well, but it would do much better if everyday citizens became more deeply engaged in public life. 

Charles N. Wheeler III is director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

Illinois Issues October 1999 / 43