(sparkly music) (dramatic music) - Welcome to Capitol View on WSIU, I'm Brian Sapp.

This week we're going to look at Illinois politics like we do every week, and we're going to discuss the impacts and reactions to the passage and signing of the budget reconciliation bill in Washington last week.

We'll also talk about the shuffling of elected officials in these positions around the state as more candidates are jumping into the fray for the 2026 election.

We'll have all that and more on this week's edition.

Joining us this week are Alex Degman, he's the State House reporter for WBEZ Public Radio and Dan Petrella of the Chicago Tribune.

Gentlemen, welcome to the program.

- Thanks for having me, thanks.

- Glad to see you guys.

Let's start first with, seem to suck up a lot of the air around nationally and here in Illinois.

Last week, president Trump signed the one big beautiful bill.

This budget reconciliation bill was one of his priorities in Congress' or the Republican Congress's priorities.

There were lots of cuts, lots of changes, and I think we're still trying to make sense of all of this.

One of the chief cuts that we've heard about are custom Medicaid and SNAP.

Alex, what are some of the initial impacts that we're seeing to Illinois and what were some of the reactions last week?

- Well, a lot of the reactions fell in Illinois, at least, like you might expect along party lines.

Like there was a little bit of drama as the vote was going through the house.

Will they, won't they some Republicans over whether it adds too much to the debt or other things.

But Illinois, generally, our Republican Congress people kinda fell in line.

They reacted positively to it.

And as you might imagine, Democrats reacted negatively to it.

Governor Pritzker was among the first people to react forcefully as he just kinda leaned into the line of thinking that he's been doing for the past couple of months that Trump is acting like a king and we don't have kings in this country and he won't bend the need to one that whole thing.

So, he's really leaning into that and he's trying to put forth the idea that the state will do whatever it can to offset this.

And you may see that from time to time in legislation during the spring session where things are introduced to kind of offset mitigating factors that might come and things like that.

But here we have a little bit more of a tangential problem that could come from, as you mentioned, Medicaid, because Illinois is a trigger state.

When the Affordable Care Act passed, some states, like Illinois passed laws a little bit later on agreeing to do that expansion if a lack of federal funding will trigger the end of the participation.

So that's a really convoluted way of basically saying if federal funding for expanded Medicaid falls below 90%, then according to Illinois law, we stop participating in it.

And according to the governor's office, that could mean anywhere from 750 to 800,000 people could lose their healthcare coverage.

So what can the state do to offset that?

That's gonna be a big question once this comes to before.

And then also you mentioned SNAP benefits.

SNAP benefits are really concerning for people who rely on them because you know, number one, where are people gonna get their food?

And number two, the state would have to pay more to manage the program.

That's one of the big things that the state's concerned about because right now the federal government does a lot of it, but with some of these changes, the states are going to have some of the cost shifted onto them.

So the federal government saves like 280 billion over 10 years in the states spend 121 billion or something like that.

So, now in terms of how the actual budget, the actual state budget remains to be seen.

A good portion of the state's actual budget is federal because, you know, a State House reporter types, we like to talk about numbers in the range of 55.1 to 55.3 billion.

Well that's a state portion of it.

There's a lot of federal money that comes into state coffers and it's a lot more than that and a good portion of it pays for Medicaid.

So, we're just gonna have to see how this all trickles down.

- Okay, alright.

Dan, what were some of the reactions that you saw and also you wanted to talk about something that hadn't been reported on a lot?

- Yeah, you know, I think Alex is absolutely right.

I think we can expect to see a lot of discussion from the governor and other Democrats about the negatives of this bill.

So far this week.

You know, the president signed into law on Friday, the July 4th holiday.

And we've seen press release every day so far this week from the governor's office pointing out things that they don't like in the bill on healthcare, on food benefits.

One thing that hasn't been discussed quite as much, it was controversial in the bill was the limit that was put in place in the 2017 tax bill during Trump's first presidency that limited the amount of state and local taxes that folks can deduct on their federal income taxes, put a $10,000 cap on that, the measure that the president signed into the law raises that cap to $40,000.

And it does that for five years.

So it is, you know, a benefit that accrues to, you know, wealthier people, but it also hits some middle income folks, especially in the Chicago suburbs where it's not unheard of for people, you know, to pay upward of $10,000, $15,000, even in some places on their property tax bills.

So at an event held by the ACLU of Illinois yesterday, representative Sean Casten from West Suburban Downers Grove described that change as the skittle in a bowl of poison is how he described it I think.

You know, I think there's other concerns were raised during that particular event as well about the increase in funding for immigration enforcement in the bill.

You know, there's a lot of concern in some circles about the way ICE and other federal immigration authorities have conducted themselves over the last several months.

There are some members of Congress and state legislators holding a news conference Wednesday morning in Chicago about federal agents supposedly were sort of sniffing around the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood.

So there's a lot of anxiety about that.

And also concern among people on the left about taking money away from, you know, people in need, people who need healthcare, people who need food benefits, and putting it toward, you know, this mass deportation effort that the Trump administration has been trying to stage since they took office back in January.

- Okay.

I covered an event last week down here where several groups, advocacy groups presented some petitions to Mike Bost's office.

And a lot of his response has been like you said, Alex, towing the line, falling in line behind the president.

And then also we kinda our coverage area also covers Mary Miller's district and she's right behind the president there.

So either of you, how will this impact the general assembly?

What things are they gonna have to do with some of this funding?

I mean, since things are so tight, how will this impact the general assembly going forward?

- I mean, we're already seeing a very tight budget situation in Illinois, the tightest we've seen in years.

And, you know, for example, the SNAP changes if they go into full effect, the governor's office estimating could, you know, cost the state more than $700 million, which is a fairly large percentage of the state budget that's, you know, like doubled the amount that they increase K to 12 education funding every year.

So it's just a hole, that would be, I think, nearly impossible for the state to make up without looking for some additional source of revenue to help pay for it.

And politically I think, you know, we've seen, you know, you mentioned the Illinois members of Congress falling in line behind the president, but even the Republicans from other states who put up protests to certain aspects of the bill when the rubber hit the road, all fell in line.

I mean, Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska was able to subtract some Alaska specific benefits to get her vote for the bill.

So, I think really on a national level, it just speaks to the way Republicans are all falling in line behind the president.

- Yeah, everybody seemed to fall into their camp and stick to that.

Wanted to move on to another story, Dan, we'll stick with you.

You reported this week on Senator Harmon.

He was facing a fine of nearly $10 million for some campaign finance errors that he says from the Illinois State Board of Elections.

His campaign filed an appeal and you reported on that.

What did the appeal say and where do things stand?

- Yeah, that's correct.

This is an issue that arose actually out of some reporting some of my colleagues did earlier this spring when they were starting to ask some questions of the board about contributions that Don Harmon who's the senate president from near west Suburban Oak Park received during last year's campaign.

And the board determined that a contribution that he made back in January of 2023, that he believed lifted the contribution limits in his races for his seat through the end of at least 2024, if not through the March, 2026 primary.

The board says those caps actually should have gone back on after the March, 2024 primary.

And so he took in more than $4 million in contributions that were over the limits.

He, in his appeal and publicly has disputed that idea, you know, it's sort of technical and arcane in campaign finance law.

But, you know, one of his major arguments is that the way the board is interpreting the law would treat house and senate candidates differently because house candidates run on two year cycles and senate candidates run on either four or two year cycles depending on where they're at.

Once every decade, each Senate seat is up for two four year terms and one two year terms.

So, you know, President Harmon argues that the law should treat them equally despite the fact that house and senate members are not running for the same seats, not running against each other or in the same, you know, length terms necessarily.

So, he is challenging the fine, which was calculated based on the amount that they say he took over the limits, and then a 150% payments to the state's general fund as a fine on top of the amount that that he took.

So, there's gonna be a hearing late next month.

So we'll see, you know, oftentimes when the board does levy fines, they end up being reduced through the appeals process.

But, it's gonna be really fascinating to see, you know, where this goes.

And I think it's interesting too because he tried to sort of, in his words, clarify the law with a some language he slipped into an omnibus elections bill that ended up not passing at the end of the spring session because of the uproar over this provision that was seen as him sort of trying to clean the slate for himself with the board of elections.

Although that's a characterization that he disputes as well.

- I noticed that at the end of the session we saw that.

And then I also noticed that he talked about that in he wrote a editorial for the Tribune that I noticed ran like right after your story.

Is this size a fine?

Is this, since I'm new to Illinois politics, is this unprecedented or where does this stand?

- I'm not sure if it's the largest fine ever, but it is close to, it's very unusual for a fine to be levy that said particularly of, you know, one of the leaders of a chamber of the legislature and one of the authors of the law that he's being accused of violating.

You know, this speaks to a bigger problem with campaign finance in Illinois where the system that was set up supposedly to protect, you know, your average Joe who wants to run from office, from wealthy candidates who can self-fund campaigns is actually exploited by leaders on both sides of the aisle who make contributions to their own campaigns above the limit.

Sometimes even just loaning money to their campaigns that they then repay themselves to lift those caps and allow them to take in unlimited contributions from, you know, be it labor unions and trial lawyers on the left or corporations and you know, other billionaires and things on the right.

So, it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

- Yeah, we'll have to have to wait and see, let it work its way through.

I wanna move on to the session finish.

We're about a month and a half out from the general assembly of session.

The governor's going through signing some bills.

One of those was the prison review board.

Alex, can you kind of tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind this bill and what the bill will achieve?

- Yeah, there was a pretty wide scale change to the prisoner review board in a number of ways because of one specific incident.

I'm gonna remind you about Crosetti Brand of Chicago.

He had just been released and he stabbed 11-year-old Jayden Perkins to death as he was actually trying to kill Terry Smith, who was Jayden's mother and Brand's ex-partner.

And there were a lot of cracks that had to be fallen through for this to happen.

And this kinda this takes an attempt to seal most of them.

It focuses first on enhanced victim rights.

So, people can now make impact statements before prisoner review board hearings.

It lets the panel hear how the person that's up for release has impacted people in a real world scenario, victims will need to know further in advance about early release decisions that are being made and they need to be armed with more information like the prisoner review board and the state needs to give them information about the state victim assistance hotline for example.

Dedicated victim services, for example.

And this is the big one, victims can now seek an order of protection against somebody even if that person is still in jail.

And this is where, this is one of the big cracks that I was talking about because Lateria Smith tried to take out an order of protection against Crosetti Brand, but she was told no because he was still in jail and, you know, what's the reason for that?

But he got out and as I mentioned, he ended up killing her son.

So those are the changes to victim services, but it also makes changes to the board itself.

First of all, if you're on the PRB, you have to be there for longer.

The terms are now eight years instead of six.

And that's just, you know, trying for more institutional knowledge.

People who know more things are there for longer.

There needs to be more experience on the board overall now.

The law says at least 7 out of the 15 board members need to have at least five years experience as either a cop, a parole officer, a defense attorney or a prosecutor, a judge, basically anything in law enforcement or prosecution areas.

And believe it or not, and I didn't even know this, but there wasn't a website for all of this information.

So if somebody's up for parole, like there's really no way for the public to see what the PRB was doing.

So the law says you have to create a website, you have to complete reports on everybody that you release.

And yeah, that's pretty much it.

It's a lot things in one bill, but again, this is something that happened just because of a very specific reason.

They saw like, "Oh, there's an actual real world consequence for the cracks of this and we need to fix that."

And that's what happened.

- Yeah, it was a really tragic case, I think.

Yeah, that happened before I moved here.

But even where I lived in Indiana, I had heard about, you know, this case and it was just really tragic and he was just, Crosetti Brand was just convicted, is that correct?

- He was, he was just convicted, I believe, Dan, you might have to back me up, but it was just a few weeks ago, right?

- Yeah, I believe it was in late May or early June.

So it was right around the time that the bill was passed and the session was wrapping up.

You know, and I think it speaks to the fact that the prisoner review board has been a political problem for Pritzker for a while now, back even before this latest issue, he had a couple of his appointments rejected by Democrats in the state Senate who have to confirm those appointments.

And there was concern particularly among some, you know, suburban moderates and moderates from more moderate parts of the city of Chicago and downstate that the folks at Pritzker had appointed to the board were too lenient with letting people out.

And now there's been criticism since then that some of the newer members that have been appointed are a little bit too stringent.

And so it's sort of this, you know, trying to strike this balance between, you know, the idea of the Department of Corrections, which is to, you know, rehabilitate people and get them back into society versus, you know, the idea of making sure that people who might, you know, do bad things again once they get out aren't released.

- Okay, well let's move on.

We are 15 months from or a little bit more than 15 months from the 2026 election.

Last, as we said, governor Pritzker announced that he's running for his third term.

Earlier, just a couple months ago, Senator Durbin said that he's not going to run again.

We've had lots of people moving around trying to, this has really caused to reshuffle, you know, when I went to high sch... Or college here at SIU, Senator Durbin was just coming into be the senator.

So we're talking about a generational shift.

Dan, there's some implications across the whole state with just people moving around.

And that was a story that you worked on recently, who we seeing move around and what are some of the top stories as we go, you know, are there new names we're gonna have to learn?

- Yeah, it's incredibly hard to keep track.

We've got a running list story that we've been updating regularly on our website of just a few of the congressional races here in the Chicago area.

And it feels like every few hours we're adjusting that or somebody who was considering it is now in and that sort of thing.

So like you said, the decision by Dick Durbin to retire is sorta the thing that set off this whole chain of dominoes.

So that starts with an open senate seat.

So you have Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton with the backing of Governor Pritzker running for that seat.

And then you've got Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi from Schaumburg running for it.

You've got Robin Kelly from South Suburban Matteson running for it.

And, you know, those are the, you know, sort of the major can candidates on the democratic side, which then opens up seats in the Congress.

So, and then on top of that, Jan Schakowsky from Evanston from the North Shore another longtime member of Congress also decided that she's going to retire.

So that really has set off another chain reaction.

So in Schakowsky's race, for example, you have now three state legislators, Senators Laura Fine and Mike Simmons and State Representative Hoan Huynh among the, I believe now 12 or 13 candidates in just the Democratic primary in that race.

So, you know, there's a woman who, you know, has built a big following on social media and has worked for some advocacy organizations who's getting into that race.

There's a gentleman who just announced yesterday, a survivor of one of the first school shootings in the US committed by a woman named Laurie Dann.

Former FBI agent, who announced he's running for the seat so all sorts of shuffling going on.

Then down in the second district, which actually goes from the south side of Chicago all the way down to Danville, which is the seat that Robin Kelly has held for a long time.

Senator Robert Peters from Chicago is among those running for that seat.

Cook County commissioner Donna Miller, who's from the south suburbs just declared today that she's also running for that seat.

Many other names in that race.

There's now speculation rumblings going on that Jesse Jackson Jr. who held the seat for a long time before he went to federal prison for some campaign funds, misappropriations is toying with the idea of running again for the seat.

You also have Krishnamoorthi's eighth district up in sort of the northwest suburbs and Cook County commissioner Kevin Morrison is one of the candidates there.

There're several other people who are running for the seat as well, people who have worked for Raja or been otherwise associated with him or among those people.

So yeah, it's really a big shuffle and obviously there will be, you know, some of those state senators for example are midterm and so they can sort of take a free shot at running for Congress and not lose their seat in the legislature.

But Hoan Huynh in the house, for example, who's from the north side of Chicago running for Schakowsky's seat, he's given up his seat in the Illinois house to run if he decides to, you know, follow through and get his name on the congressional ballot.

So there'll be a plethora of state legislative races as a result as well.

You know, I think one of the interesting things is the lack of known candidates for many of these seats on the Republican side.

You know, we really haven't seen anybody of prominence declare for the Senate race.

You know, we haven't even really seen other than the DuPage County Sheriff James Mendrick, anybody really throw their hat in the ring in the race for governor, which I know was discussed at length on the show last week.

So it is really, you know, interesting to see that the GOP is kind of biting its time.

What we're searching around for people to run for some of these seats, you know, early next month folks are gonna have to start hitting the streets to collect petition signatures.

So we'll maybe get a better sense of who's really running for some of these seats.

But, it is going to be one of the most, you know, active and dynamic elections, particularly in the Democratic primaries that we've seen in a while.

- I love elections.

I like watching just the psychology behind it and just people, you know, as they run from that.

Alex, I wanted to bring you in just really quick, how do you see this impacting the State House?

Will this distract from the work that the State House has to do?

Or, do you think there will be much there?

- Well, I think it largely depends on how many people in the State House try to move up as it were.

I mean, Dan just mentioned Hoan Huynh, if he wants to run for Congress, he's gonna give up his seat in the house and that's gonna open something up.

But aside from that, I don't really know if there is a lot of appetite for that in the State House right now.

I mean, I think the last time I asked that question, it was months ago, you know, asking the speaker or asking the set of president, "Hey, are you thinking about what happens if some of your members try to go to Washington?"

And, I mean, they weren't really thinking about that right then 'cause obviously it wasn't on their radar.

But even if they do, you know, a seat like Hoan Huynh on the north side of Chicago, you know, Greg Harris formerly held that and he was a longtime statehouse dentist and a budget negotiator.

So, that seat and many of the seats in the Chicago area that we're talking about are probably safely blue, safely democratic.

So in terms of the structure of power, probably not.

It might just get kind of confusing for a while as people try to, you know, figure out where they're going and what they're doing.

- And just logistically it usually means not a lot of activity in the State House until after the primaries, right?

They usually pack the schedule into the later part of the session to, you know, and take a lot of time off in March and stuff to give people time to campaign.

- You know, part of me really loved the end of session in April, part of me didn't, so?

We'll see if it happens, that'd be fun.

- Oh shoot, I think we'll have to do like Dan and the rest of the people there to trip.

Just start that list so we can keep track of everybody.

We have about two and a half minutes left before I wanna wrap up.

One law that took effect at the beginning of July is actually not Illinois law, but in Indiana law.

And that well could have some impact, but really not much.

Dan you did a little bit of reporting on Indiana's law to set up a commission, those state or those counties in Illinois that may wanna leave the state.

We've got about two minutes left.

Can you tell us a little bit about the law and where does it go from here?

- Yes.

So, the real answer is at least here in Illinois, it goes nowhere.

So, it was described by folks Democrats here in Illinois, in particular as a political stunt in Indiana.

Actually, their house speaker introduced this bill.

It was the only bill he was the main sponsor in their session this spring.

And it sets up this commission, the idea was equal members from each state to kinda discuss the idea of whether some of these counties that have voted in recent years on these advisory non-binding referendums about wanting to, you know, secede from the state of Illinois or carve off Chicago and Cook County from the state of Illinois should join Indiana.

You know, there are these long simmering regional tensions that have existed as long as Illinois has existed, maybe even longer than Illinois has existed as a state.

And so, you know, we had a companion bill here in the state legislature that was introduced by Brad Holberg of Shelbyville, one of the most conservative members of the Illinois House, a member of the Illinois Freedom Caucus.

And it sat in the house rules committee all session, never even got assigned to a committee for a hearing.

So, a clear indication that Democrats who control everything in Springfield are not at all interested in this idea, you know, and even Holberg himself at the end of session when I asked him about the bill and the fact that it hadn't gone anywhere and what that means for the folks who, you know, want a serious discussion of this issue admitted, I think his quote was something like, "We don't need a new state, we need a new governor."

So, obviously people will have the chance to make that choice next year if they want to.

But, you know, it really just... And one more thing I'll add is that even the folks here in Illinois who want to separate the state don't really say that they wanna go and join Indiana either so, and, you know, a lot of the counties that have voted this way are kinds that actually receive more state funding than they contribute to the state coffers.

So I'm not sure that it would be beneficial to Indiana to take them on either, frankly.

- That's a lot of the reporting.

That's what I've heard since I've moved here.

Well, that's all the time we've got for this.

So Alex and Dan, thanks for joining this week.

Love the insight, love the talk.

That's it.

Like I said, that's it for this week's edition of Capitol View.

Join us next time as we look at what's making news around the state of Illinois.

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