With crime spiking across Illinois, both parties in Springfield find themselves wrestling with a life-and-death issue that’s begging for problem-solvers, not demagoguery. Yet politics is never far behind.
In Illinois, the issue provides an obvious target for Republicans, who have too little power at this point to bear much of the blame. Democrats don’t have that luxury as they search instead for some good news to justify the merits of the sweeping criminal justice legislation they passed last year, even as they have added additional crime-fighting proposals for this year’s condensed session in Springfield.
New House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, now finishing his first year in the chair occupied by former Speaker Mike Madigan before he was voted out, has an ambitious agenda, although he remains cheerfully tight-lipped about the tricky specifics.
