Election-year politics make crime, inflation top issues in shortened Illinois legislative session
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Republican state lawmakers, outnumbered and looking to boost their relevance, had one goal for the election-year legislative session — to paint majority Democrats as soft-on-crime and anti-police.
Democrats, sensing political vulnerability, knew they had to counter by passing some pro-police, anti-crime legislation that didn’t weaken their larger equity-based criminal justice goals.
They also sought to change the subject, pushing election-year tax relief for families amid public concerns over inflation.
Crime and inflation became the watch words as the final hours of the truncated spring legislative session played out early Saturday. Those two themes, brought from the national stage to the local statehouse, are likely to be struck repeatedly in TV ads and campaign literature as the June 28 primary and Nov. 8 general election grow closer.
The General Assembly missed its self-imposed Friday session deadline, finally adjourning at 6:10 a.m. Saturday. Its traditional end-of-May cutoff date was bumped up to allow lawmakers, as well as Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who’s running for a second term, to hit the campaign trail.
Not long before adjournment, Democrats sent to Pritzker’s desk a $46.5 billion spending plan for the budget year that begins July 1, sprinkled with election-year tax cuts and rebate checks for voters.
Democrats, hoping to maintain supermajorities in the Illinois House and Senate in November, caught a break on both the economic and crime fronts with an
