“And so this, I think, is performative. We don’t know what will happen. There’s a lot of things that we have no control over.”
State Rep. William Hauter, R-Morton, delivered that quote Wednesday at a House budget committee meeting during a discussion covering the impact of potential cuts to federal Medicaid funding.
The rest of Hauter’s quote, per Capitol News Illinois, addresses what state lawmakers can’t control: “budget negotiations going on at the federal level.”
That’s obviously correct. However, being unable to control how another government acts is rarely an impediment to discussing ramifications. And when there are harbingers of action, bracing for impact is fairly presented as due diligence.
Although vastly different in scale, a House committee planning for Medicaid disruption is much like a city council or village board discussing how to handle the loss of funding when the state stops collecting the 1% sales tax on groceries.
To be clear, whatever is happening in Washington right now is indeed theoretical and the grocery tax elimination is scheduled. But when Gov. JB Pritzker first floated the idea in his 2024 budget address, the Illinois Municipal League issued a statement the same day calling the plan “insulting,” and mayors around the state tried pressuring lawmakers to stall or change the proposal.
Those efforts echoed with state Rep. Bob Morgan, D-Deerfield, who took time during Wednesday’s hearing to ask his Republican colleagues in Springfield to try to leverage their influence with Illinois’ GOP Congressional delegation.
At least one of those folks, GOP U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, was busy Wednesday at his own hearing, as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform spent about six hours questioning mayors from Boston, Chicago, Denver and New York about municipal policies regarding federal immigration law.
The reader’s political predilections will inform whether that Capitol Hill proceeding was performative or productive. But taken in context with Medicaid and grocery tax dialogue, it’s a reminder of the interconnectedness of our taxing bodies. Governments overlap in so many aspects of life – think of all the jurisdictional roadway responsibilities next time you take a half-hour drive – it sometimes seems the system is designed to confound.
It’s nice to imagine a world where each government relies solely on its own funding sources and enforces its own rules, but the American experiment has for nearly 250 years been moving in the opposite direction. Untangling those knots might well be impossible.
VOTES AGAINST CHANGE: Nothing has drawn more reader feedback than the process of considering new state flag designs. Unsurprisingly, public vote totals released Thursday revealed an overwhelming preference for the status quo. The process must be completed, but it’ll be shocking if lawmakers do anything other than formally accept the current flag.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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