Chicago Tribune Editorial: Profiles in failure

Chicago Tribune Editorial: Profiles in failure
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
3:46 p.m. CDT, May 8, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-edit-budget-0509-20100508,0,3279926.story


There must be some reason all of us keep paying our legislators. Their record of accomplishment isn't it. For a second year since many of them promised a post-Blagojevich era of responsibility, many of them aren't confronting the three crises that have Illinois — and its jobs-starved economy — circling a drain.

House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton again are responding with little beyond an instinct for survival — of their fellow Democrats in the Nov. 2 election and, by extension, of their own majestic clout. Early and often in this session, as in 2009's, we warned that the two Chicagoans need to reform business practices by which the state overspends and overborrows for Medicaid, pensions and other priorities. They need to deliver tougher ethics protections against the Illinois culture of political sleaze. They need to raise this state's 48th-in-the-U.S. record of job creation by making Illinois the low-cost, low-hassle choice for employers seeking business-friendly locales.

On these three urgent priorities, Madigan and Cullerton are failing, failing and failing. They and their caucuses headed home Friday with vague pledges to grapple, someday, with their epic challenges.

Two years, gentlemen. You and Gov. Pat Quinn have had the better part of two years to reinvent Illinois, just as thousands of companies and taxpayers had to restructure their operations.

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Just do your jobs without focusing so much on the election. The rest of us will take care of that.