January 28, 2015

by Jim Nowlan
Outside Columnist

Politics is largely about who gets what and is a game of debits and credits amassed over the years by political power players.
In the 1950s, U.S. Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen of Pekin would on many a late afternoon saunter over to the hideaway Capitol office of legendary Senate majority leader Lyndon Baines Johnson. Over a bourbon-and-branch water, or two, these political powerhouses would shape the national policy agenda for the coming week and beyond – while taking care of home state priorities.
In the 1990s, Speaker of the U.S. House Dennis Hastert (R-Yorkville in northeast Illinois) watched closely over the interests of the Prairie State.
Those days are gone. Today, according to Roll Call magazine, a tip sheet for Washington DC insiders, Illinois has slipped from 4th to 17th in recent years in its “clout ranking” among the states, even though we are 5thin population..
This is important because, as I have said in this space, Illinois receives only about 56 cents back for every tax dollar we send to Washington, while all of our neighboring states harvest much more than a dollar for every dollar sent to the federal coffers.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.