Marathon Pundit: Lt. Gov. Quinn supports amendment to Ill. constitution adding recall option

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Lt. Gov. Quinn supports amendment to Ill. constitution adding recall option

As I blogged earlier this week, the Chicago Tribune boldly suggested that an amendment to the Illinois constitution be quickly enacted that would allow for voters to recall public officials.

And they have someone in mind when by suggesting the amendment: Governor Rod Blagojevich, the Chicago Democrat who has been a complete failure as chief executive of the nation's fifth-most populous state.

By most accounts, "Blago" works just a few hours a day, if that. He refused to live in the seat of government, Springfield, but generally stays away from the massive James R. Thompson Center in Chicago as well.

Some state lawmakers are in favor of the idea, including Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn, also a Democrat. In fact, Quinn's leading the charge for the amendment, buy is coy on whether Blagojevich should be bagged by a future recall push.

Chicago's Democratic Mayor, Richard Daley is against it.

More from Sunday's Chicago "free registration required" Tribune editorial that I didn't excerpt the other day:

The bill of particulars against Rod Blagojevich is numbingly familiar. His is a legacy of federal and state investigations of alleged cronyism and corruption in the steering of pension fund investments to political donors, in the subversion of state hiring laws, in the awarding of state contracts, in matters as personal as that mysterious $1,500 check made out to the governor's then-7-year-old daughter by a friend whose wife had been awarded a state job.

Presented this year with an extraordinary opportunity -- his Democratic Party controlling both houses of the Illinois General Assembly -- Blagojevich has squandered what should have been a leadership moment: He is governor of a state in desperate need of more accountability in its public schools, of a new tax formula for funding those schools, of a meaningful attack on its swelling pension indebtedness. Today Illinois has ... solutions to none of the above.

Instead, taxpayers are bankrolling an endless game of chicken between legislative leaders and a governor known to boast about his self-diagnosed "testicular virility." Blagojevich has clumsily tried to recast himself as a prairie populist, bashing his state's employers. He has borrowed from the future to cover costs of state government today. And in a fiasco that may have its own constitutional implications, he has redirected millions of taxpayers' dollars to personal priorities that he can't convince lawmakers to support.

Blagojevich is an intentionally divisive governor and a profoundly unhelpful influence. He is unwilling or unable to see the chaos all around him. This year, lawmakers failed to make progress on schools, on state pension reform, on any number of critical matters. Mass transit in the Chicago region is about to implode, largely because of the state government's failure.