(bright music) - After we recorded this program on Wednesday, former Democratic Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan was convicted on public corruption charges.

A federal jury found him guilty on 10 of 23 counts.

The jury deliberated for over two weeks after three months of testimony.

The jury acquitted the former speaker on seven charges and deadlocked on six counts.

Madigan's co-defendant was veteran Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain.

McClain was not convicted after the jury deadlocked on the same charges.

You can read much more on the verdict at wsiu.org.

We now go to the rest of the show as it was recorded before the verdict on Wednesday.

(rousing music) Thanks for joining us on "Capitol View," I'm Fred Martino.

This week as Republicans consider healthcare funding in Washington, there are deep concerns in Illinois and elsewhere.

Plus, President Trump pardons a former Illinois Governor and a major Great Lakes project is on hold due to fears over the potential loss of federal dollars.

Those stories and more with John Jackson from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Hannah Meisel from Capital News Illinois.

John, Illinois like most states, were able to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

It has provided healthcare, of course, to tens of millions of people, but Illinois law requires the state to withdraw from the expansion if federal reimbursement falls below 90%.

Columnist Rich Miller recently covered this concern.

Tell us more.

- Well, let me set the context first.

This is of course, President Trump and Elon Musk threatened cuts and where would they come and are they a waste and fraud or are they real programs with real people?

And constitutionally, the question is very much on the table.

Now, can they do this by executive order?

And these are real laws with real congressional involvement.

What is the role of the Congress in all of this?

And the national debate is very much owned, including Tuesday night, when you saw Elon Musk and the President in the Oval Office in that extraordinary press conference where Musk was talking about all these possibilities, things like getting rid of full cabinets, positions like the Education Department, for example, or independent agencies like USAID and all those cuts are being made and some of them by simple announcement on X by Elon Musk.

So can this be done and what would be the impact on things like Medicaid and Medicare?

And those who are defending the program, in this case, Medicaid, are going out and talking to these senators and talking to people like Dale Fowler down in this end of the state whose Carbondale district is included in his district, talking about the number of people on Medicaid and what Medicaid means to his constituency.

Over 14,000 people are involved.

And something like 700, there's a great number more, I've forgotten the exact number, but a great number more nationally and statewide, I think it's something like 770,000 people that would be impacted.

So when you defend your program, you get real people and real clients to talk to people like Senator Fowler.

- Yeah, and John, we should say this, when you give those numbers, and I gave a number at the top for the nation, we're talking about tens of millions of people.

That is only the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

Also on the table is that at the end of 2025, the expiration of additional subsidies that allowed many, many more people to purchase healthcare through the Affordable Care Act, the subsidy bonus that occurred during the Biden administration also on the table.

John, very quickly, 'cause we need to move to the next story.

What do you think's gonna happen here?

Do you think these will be cut, these various programs that are so popular with people nationally?

- Well, I think a fair number of them will be cut.

And the problem is there is good constitutional law going all the way back to Nixon that says the president can't, it was called the Impoundment Control Act, that Nixon tried to use.

The Supreme Court decision is a landmark decision.

It clearly says that the president can delay, but he cannot cut a program that has presidential approval.

And so this will wind up in the courts, but I think they'd have to overturn that Nixon era constitutional law case.

- We will see and certainly will cause a great, great deal of controversy over the next year.

Hannah, we move to you now for our next story.

You covered this story for Capitol News Illinois, also deals with the Trump administration, a presidential pardon for a former Illinois governor.

- Great.

As you can see, I am here in the Federal courthouse in Chicago awaiting a Madigan verdict, which we'll talk about.

But in this same courthouse years ago, Rod Blagojevich was convicted, sentenced to 14 years in prison.

In 2020, Trump commuted his sentence and let him out of prison basically after eight years instead of the full 14.

Since then, I think Rod has been quietly kind of, he's been trying to get in Trump's good graces or remain in Trump's good graces.

And you know, even angling perhaps, we will see, for an ambassadorship to Serbia but in order to do that, he would need to be cleared of his convictions.

And so it had been rumored for a few days, but ultimately on Monday, Trump did indeed give a full pardon to Rod Blagojevich.

And in classic Rod Blagojevich fashion, he held a news conference that evening outside of his home on Chicago's Northwest Side and was unrepentant as ever and said, "I didn't do it and I want the people of Illinois to know I never raised your taxes."

Leaving aside, of course, the fact that his reckless decisions left Illinois in holes that we are continuing to climb out of years and years later.

- All right.

John, we're gonna move to you again.

And the grave concerns across the country, you've addressed this already, about federal spending cuts and also possible cuts.

So much so in Illinois that a major Great Lakes project is now on hold.

Tell us more.

- I like this example because it's a homely little example, very important to people right there at home if you live around Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes.

And it's kind of obscure in the sense of they're trying desperately over the last 10 or so years to keep the invasive species of carp from swimming upstream and getting into Lake Michigan and destroying the fishing in Lake Michigan because they're such aggressive creatures.

And so the Illinois Department of Natural Resources was working away, they were working under the program passed in the Joe Biden era, the Infrastructure Improvements Act, and they had the money they thought.

And all of a sudden the governor put it on hold because he points out that the Trump approach has created chaos all across the country.

They've been notified that they're not going to necessarily be able to count on that money for what IDNR was doing.

They were getting ready to close some deals that are involved with landowners and they needed I think it was 117 million.

Michigan, by the way, has the same problem and has the same stake, they're putting in 117 million.

And it's a huge program nationwide, but relative chicken feed in the federal budget.

But can Trump do this by edict and can Elon Musk do this by edict?

Discussed that momentarily a minute ago, and there's a lot of constitutional law says he can't, but that doesn't mean it's gonna be immediately solved because it takes a very long time to get the Supreme Court to overturn something.

- Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned Michigan.

I reported in Michigan between 2000 and 2008.

And this story was a story back then.

So that's how, I mean, we've been waiting decades to address this kind of invasive species issue.

It doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's incredibly, incredibly important.

We can't cover all of the intricacies of it on this show, but we say look it up because this is important and wanted to highlight it here that even the fear of cuts is already having an effect on state policies.

Hannah, some of your colleagues at Capitol News Illinois have been reporting on JB Pritzker's reaction to President Trump's proposed policies, including tariffs and a funding cut for electric vehicle chargers.

Tell us more about that.

- That's right.

The Trump administration has let states know that a program called the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program that was created under Biden, they were supposed to put $5 billion toward building new EV chargers, was gonna be halted.

IDOT, the Department of Transportation had been administering the program and gotten 25 million for the first round of funding, we were supposed to get 148 million through 2027.

January 31st, the second round of funding, the applications for that closed.

Pritzker had put a goal, I think, that states back to the 2021 energy big infrastructure plan, if I remember correctly, to have a million electric vehicles on Illinois roads by 2030.

You know, that's all well and good if you buy an electric vehicle, but you can't get very far if there's not a lot of chargers around for you to go far.

So that's one.

There's not a lot that you can do if the federal funding is just halted.

Of course, you can sue over that.

We'll see if courts provide any mediation in that.

But this program, it's definitely gonna be on kind of its lifeline, whatever federal money that we've already gotten.

But this is kind of a harbinger for what's to come, as John already mentioned, Medicaid cuts.

But we're also looking at possible major cuts for education funding because a lot of education funding is a pass-through to the states and if Illinois suddenly had to cover things, like Title 1 funding or transportation, those are two examples of federal funding when it comes to education.

We don't have that money.

We're already facing, you know, we'll talk about a shortfall for the state budget.

Of course, the governor is set to deliver his budget address next week, but it's gonna be in a time of major, major uncertainty.

- Absolutely, and Illinois lawmakers of course looking at the potential for budget adjustments with a projected deficit of over $3 billion.

But John, lawmakers are also looking not only at expenses that affect the state budget, but also expenses that affect individuals.

And some lawmakers are pushing a bill to stop schools from issuing fines as punishment.

The "Chicago Sun-Times" reported on this.

What did you learn?

- A quick postscript to our budget and to what Hannah was just mentioning, in the universities the cuts are really serious in the threat that they will take away overhead recovery on grants for the federal government.

If they were to do that, universities, research universities especially would just be clobbered.

So just a footnote to that, why the universities are so up in arms about some of this.

This is a relatively routine kind of legislation.

It grows out of a bill that was seriously considered in 2022 and it prohibits K through 12 schools from imposing fines on their students.

And it's for various infractions.

K through 12 schools have been imposing fines for littering and loud noises and hand gestures.

And I thought the study attached to it was very interesting.

There had been 11,800 tickets across Illinois issued in the period of 2019 to '21.

Parenthetically, universities have faced this for a long time, back to the universities.

And we basically have already done all of this.

We don't fine our students with the exception of parking tickets that we take care of, but this is trying to move the K through 12 position to where the local legal authorities, translation is the local police force and the local state's attorney, they have to handle anything that is a serious crime and that you'd have to take seriously enough to even issue a fine.

And so it would get K-12 clearly out of the business.

So they're trying to clean up language, the language problem in '22, as I understand it, was a threat to the jurisdiction of the local authorities against state's attorneys and policemen for what they can do and trying to specify that more clearly.

The bill is by Representative La Shawn Ford and Senator Karina Villa, both from Chicago.

And it is a Chicago problem, but it's not exclusively a Chicago problem because that study was statewide.

- Yes, very interesting.

We will continue to watch that.

Certainly controversial with some folks.

Other folks say something like a fine can lead to a change in behavior just like we have taxes on certain things that lead to a change in behavior.

Hannah, a follow up now on a story that we have been covering for some time in Springfield, resolution on something that took a long time.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker has signed Karina's Law, it's an effort to remove guns in certain domestic situations.

Tell us more.

- That's right.

Domestic violence actually in Illinois between 2019 and 2023, Illinois saw a 63% increase in gun related domestic violence deaths.

So I wanna tell you that as the backdrop to this backstory.

In 2023, Karina Gonzalez, who is a Little Village Chicago resident, she was brutally murdered, she and her 15-year-old daughter Daniela by her estranged husband, who she had just a few weeks prior gotten an order of protection against.

Now in Illinois, you can seek an order of protection and ask a judge for what's called a firearm remedy, which is supposed to have local law enforcement take away the person's guns.

But it was never clear who was supposed to and a timeline for that.

So Karina's Law clarifies that within 96 hours of this certain type of order of protection being entered, local law enforcement would have to go confiscate the guns.

There was a lot of uncertainty over this but last summer, the US Supreme Court ruled on a domestic violence gun related case and they kind of in a surprise move given their other recent rulings on gun-related cases, they said that yes, it is appropriate to limit Second Amendment rights in those cases.

And so that cleared the way for lawmakers, particularly in the Illinois Senate because the House had passed this before to say, okay, we're okay and we're gonna pass this.

And so it was passed during lame duck session last month in January and like you said, signed by the governor this week.

- Yeah, and such an important story because if you look at statistics on gun violence and this also gets to the so-called Red Flag laws, the ability to take a gun away from someone who could be a danger not only to others but to themselves, because we have a lot of suicide by gun, is a tool society is using more often now and now with this law, another way to face this issue, to address this issue.

- Yeah, you know, Illinois has its own Red Flag laws that we've strengthened a number of times in the last five, six years.

There's always tweaking that goes along with that as we have specific cases that come up.

But certainly we might revisit what is in Karina's Law.

I know that there was negotiations over the logistics of especially small sheriff's departments, where are you gonna actually store the guns?

And so there was a kind of concession made to continue allowing people to transfer their guns to another FOID cardholder.

- Yeah, very interesting.

We'll continue to watch that as Karina's Law is now implemented.

We have about five minutes left John, and we end with a timely commentary in the "Chicago Sun-Times."

As Illinois faces a projected budget shortfall in the billions, the column calls for attacks on services, something that seems unlikely as Illinois is already struggling with higher property taxes than most other states as well as an income tax and a high sales tax in many areas.

Your thoughts and what you've learned about this, John?

- Well this is the budget day and this is continuation of the budget struggles.

This was kicked off, the public conversation, by the Governor's Office of Management and Budget on 1st of November issuing a projection that in FY 26, which is the budget the General Assembly's got to deal with now, we would have a shortfall of $3.2 billion if current spending continued and if revenue stayed flat and didn't increase.

And so the only way to do something about that is to either increase revenue or cut spending by cutting programs and cutting people and cutting all kinds of things that people depend on.

And state legislators all have their needs because their constituencies have needs and they want those programs that are in place to stay in place by and large.

On the other hand, the question is how unpopular would a tax increase be?

And you've got to find the revenue somewhere.

And for a long time in Illinois, the conversation about attacking the structural imbalanced budget that we had up until Pritzker centered really on the question of increasing taxes on services.

Now, number one, we're not extraordinarily high on the combined service taxes, state and local combined we're at 8.82 and a study by TurboTax showed that's seventh in the nation.

But more importantly for a real fix and real structural change, many people have suggested that Illinois' route is to expand the number and kinds of services that are taxed.

We actually have a very narrow list of services.

Last time I checked it, it was only 14 different kinds of services.

And so that one is around, the governor's been very reluctant to talk about it.

He, however, has not totally closed the door after all other things were considered seems to be the current position as Rich Miller's column discussed.

And naturally, this is just getting started.

He will give the budget address next week and we'll get more from him.

But the General Assembly's been struggling with this and you get things like what appear to progressives, for example, of why don't we just add financial services and why don't we just hit the Chicago Board of Trade and everything that changes hands would be taxed?

And that's one thing that the mayor of Chicago has pressed.

He's also talked about a new tax on sales of property above a million dollars.

So with a progressive outlook, he thinks that's a good idea.

And of course, he's got his own problems with Chicago School District and with the RTA questions.

So everybody's looking for possible places.

Service tax may well be an an important place.

- And let's not forget, John, Illinois voters have spoken out on taxes at the ballots.

They voted in the fall to tax folks who make a million dollars or more a year, to have an extra tax on that income to reduce property taxes.

- Yeah, but that's a somewhat different story.

Taxes are never popular and this one wouldn't be popular easy.

If you tax the Chicago Board of Trade, everybody except traders would say okay.

But if you tax when you go to the barbershop or when you go to the beautician, all those kinds of homely things that might be attached with a new broader expansion, then you've got real blowback and that's- - Oh yeah, absolutely.

And of course, Governor Pritzker last year at his state of the state announced the support that was eventually passed for ending the state tax on groceries that will take effect in 2026.

But it won't end for a lot of people 'cause local communities are putting it back in, including some in southern Illinois where our studios are located.

John and Hannah, thank you for being with us this week.

It never ends that we talk about taxes and more taxes and cutting taxes.

That's one thing that stays the same.

- Glad to join you Fred.

- Good to have both of you with us.

That is "Capital View."

For everyone at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino.

Take care and have a great week.

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