News Progress

•January 2, 2019•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The Illinois Monument at the Kennesaw Mountain Civil War battlefield north of Atlanta is a rather nondescript vertical block of marble.
The monument stands atop Cheatham’s Hill, which the soldiers of the 85th and 125th Illinois Regiments almost but never quite reached on June 26, 1864. The marker commemorates the courage and cohesiveness of the men who came within 30 feet of the almost impregnable Confederate earthen parapets above the sharp rise.
Each holiday season I visit my sister’s family, who live near the park, outside Marietta, GA. And each year I am drawn back to Cheatham’s Hill.
I stand at the top of the hill, looking down from the dug earthen defenses, still evident. I wonder in awe how men could have marched in formation up the hill, sure to absorb a crippling fusillade from rifles stuck through the slits of space between the earth works and the braced logs atop.
The open, grassy line of march up the hill is the shape of a football field, though maybe half again as wide and deep. Loblolly pine frame the battlefield, tall, mute sentinels to the carnage of that day. The Union lost 397 killed and wounded at just this one hill, rather insignificant in the larger scheme of things. Read More

•December 19, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The Illinois Supreme Court has repeatedly thwarted citizen efforts to vote on term limits and redistricting reform, and has dismissed, without even a hearing on the merits, a proposal to address the public employee pension mess that is strangling the state budget.
This past week, the state high court approved an outrageous violation of taxpayer-funded pension programs by awarding huge pensions to non-government union officials who put in a single day on a government payroll. How shameful this practice.
I say if the court won’t change its ways, change the court. Read on, though the next several paragraphs might be a slog.
The framers of the Illinois Constitution of 1970 provided that voters could initiate and amend the legislative article of the charter. “Structural and procedural” amendments would be allowed. In 1976, the court held that this term requires amendments be both structural and procedural. This makes it almost impossible to craft a proposal to make a single change in the legislative article that is both.
The late, eminent state Supreme Court justice Walter Schaefer pooh-poohed this court reading. “When I see that a restaurant serves both chicken and beef, that doesn’t mean every dish has to have both chicken and beef in it!” Read More

•December 12, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Gov.-elect J. B. Pritzker has begun the typical minuet of transition to office in January, creating committees to look, respectively, at how he can improve education, infrastructure, social services, whathaveyou.
I have been a part of three gubernatorial transitions over past decades, and headed one (and was just now, while writing this, invited to serve on a Pritzker committee, which I accepted).
Large committees of insiders and outsiders to government will sit around conference tables and offer prescriptions for saving our state. The well-meaning committee members may help educate the incoming governor, who in J. B.’s case came to his candidacy with little background in Illinois state government.
Most prescriptions will require more money, lots of it. There will be projections that much money can be saved in the future, if only we spend lots more now to address problems, e.g. prisoner recidivism, gang violence, abused children, poorly educated children and more. And they may be right.
Yet there is really only one “committee” that matters, and it is a committee of a solitary person—the incoming director of the state budget. Read More

•December 5, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The mayor of Chicago is arguably more important than the governor of Illinois. Maybe that’s why more than two dozen have been gathering petitions for the city’s Feb. 26 non-partisan election (though all the candidates are Democrats).
Chicago is both less and more than it used to be. After World War II, the city alone had 3.6 million residents, more than half the state’s total population. Today, there are 2.7 million, just one in five Illinoisans. Yet central city Chicago is the beating heart of a three-state metropolis of 10 million people, with a gross economic product that would make it the 20th largest nation in the world by that measure.
And I hate to say it, but the region sends lots of tax money to support schools and services for struggling Downstate communities like mine.
Chicago is a tale of at least two cities: One, the mostly white, booming downtown and North Side, where millennials flock to good high tech and professional services jobs. The other, largely African-American and Latino to the south and west, where residents feel left behind and often live in fear of out-of-control, homicidal gang bangers. Read More

•November 28, 2018•

By Tom Kacich
Of the (Champaign) News-Gazette

Champaign-Urbana owes its prominence to the University of Illinois, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign owes its existence to Clark Robinson Griggs.
If it hadn’t been for Griggs — probably the greatest political operator in Champaign County’s history — the U of I or, as it was then known, the Illinois Industrial University, would have been located in Jacksonville, Lincoln, Bloomington or perhaps Chicago.
Yet, there is no Griggs Hall at the university, no statues of Griggs on campus. Even in Urbana, where he served a year as mayor, there is only a four-block-long street that bears his name.
One can only guess why Griggs’ name has been forgotten by all but the history books. Perhaps the university is just a little ashamed of the man who could be called its father.
You see, Griggs was a bit of a scoundrel.
Much of the story of Griggs’ delightfully sly effort comes from an interview he gave to Allan Nevins (who later became known as the father of oral histories) shortly before his death. Read More