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87 9. Choosing Leaders and Saving Chrysler This is probably a very bad idea, and we may rue the day we ever started down this path. —Dawn Clark Netsch Ikept the Senate Democratic leadership team in place in my first term as Senate president: Jim Donnewald, Kenny Hall, Frank Savickas, and Terry Bruce. Donnewald was from the downstate town of Breese and was a steady presence and somebody I could always count on. Hall, of East St. Louis, represented the choice of the black caucus, and Terry Bruce, of Olney, was there for the independents and the Crazy Eight. I would put the various groups in a room and say, “You tell me who you want to be your leader. If you want my opinion, I’ll certainly give it to you, but you pick whoever you want and I’ll live with it.” That’s how Savickas, who wasn’t my favorite person, stayed on the leadership team, as the choice of the white ethnics. When I arrived in the Senate in 1971, there were only three leaders in our caucus: the Senate president and his two assistant leaders, one for Chicago and one for downstate. On two or three occasions, I was in touch with Alan Rosenthal, a political scientist from Rutgers. His specialty was state legislatures. He asked me at some meeting if I ever thought about rewarding members who had extra work as a committee chair or as an assistant leader by giving them additional pay. I told him that we had talked about it, and I said I could see it coming as the demand for additional leadership positions grew because of the diversity of our caucus and the divisions within it. We did indeed expand the leadership team to meet different wishes of the members. They liked it when I started attaching a $6,000 stipend to leadership positions. We also started paying an extra $5,000 to each of the four caucus chairs, and later, additional money was given to committee chairs as well. That bumped up the pension base for all these legislators, so it was popular. We created the caucus chair choosing leaders and saving chrysler 88 position for two reasons: to designate someone to have documents and logistics ready for a caucus meeting, and to have one more person who would get an extra stipend and, presumably, be more loyal to the head of the caucus. It was a make-work position. Not long afterward, the House picked up on it and started doing the same thing. Savickas was presiding when we had one of our most contentious debates in 1979; it was about tax relief. Illinois still had a five-cent sales tax on food and drugs and was said to be the only industrial state with this tax still on the books. It had been a controversial issue for decades. Doug Whitley of the Taxpayers Federation of Illinois reported there had been at least thirty-one attempts to remove the tax since it went into effect some forty-six years earlier.1 Around the country, tax revolts of all kinds were in the air. In 1978, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13, which limited property tax increases to 2 percent a year for homeowners at a time that property values and property taxes were increasing significantly. The voters loved it, but California cities and counties that relied on property tax revenues were going to be choked for a while. Politicians everywhere felt a lot of pressure to provide tax relief. Governor Thompson had his proposal, too. In his 1978 reelection campaign against Democrat Mike Bakalis, he got the so-called Thompson Proposition on the ballot. It was an advisory vote but got a lot of press because it called for a tax and spending ceiling. It asked, “Shall legislation be enacted and the Illinois Constitution be amended to impose ceilings on taxes and spending by the state of Illinois, units of local government, and school districts?” Thompson pushed really hard to get that question onto the November ballot, the same ballot on which he was up for reelection. His proposition was nonbinding and advisory, and so it didn’t mean anything. But the carefully crafted language sounded as if action would be taken if it passed, so it got voters excited.2 Thompson received a great deal of heat and was charged with impropriety in the collection of more than 600,000 signatures to get the proposition on...

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