Madigan sends the bill to a Committee with strong downstate presence, lets the bill pass giving his downstate conservative Members the ability to vote for it and then sits on the bill. Downstate Dems get to go back and say they sponsored or voted for the bill in committee, but they couldn’t get it to the floor, but they’ll keep working on it. Cross goes along because his downstate Members get the same opportunity and when the bill is killed, he doesn’t have to worry about his Chicago area Reps voting on it which would hurt them in a potential primary if they vote against it, but hurt them in the general for sure if they vote for it.Madigan and Cross protect their Members. Members get to say they tried. Nothing changes. Repeat.
Sending these bills to a strong pro-gun committee instead of the ones where pro-gun bills go to die is a realistic claim in lieu of the way Illinois politics works. This would be more compelling though, if "Downstate Dems" didn't vote consistently with the firearm rights movement and the Chicago Machine voting the exact opposite.
2 comments:
I don't doubt that theory for one second.
Vote against all incumbents; Illinois politicians are all corrupt.
That would make a lot more sense if they'd done it before. Why this year? Besides, Madigan allowing gun bills to go to Ag isn't new, either. It's part of a deal he made a couple of years ago. It used to be that gun bills always went to the same committee, pro or con. Judicial, I think. "Pro-gun" legislators said that they would vote for pro-gun bills, but they never made it out of committee, so the NRA and ISRA told them all to apply to sit on that committee. Then all the pro-gun bills were getting out, so the antis got Madigan to play games with the committee assignments. Then the NRA/ISRA hammered him for that, and he figuratively threw his hands up in exasperation and told both sides to specify the committee they wanted for their own bills from then on. That's why most house pro-gun bills go through the Agriculture Committee, while the anti-gun bills go through very anti-gun committees dominated by Chicago. This way nobody can give Madigan grief. I suspect that in past he saw this as no big deal because he figured none of the pro-gun bills would pass on the floor anyway.
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