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104 11. Going National and Beefing Up Our Party The word of the hour in Washington was devolution, and President Reagan wanted our help. During my first decade in the Illinois Senate, there was no organized conversation between those in the Illinois legislature and Illinois members of the U.S. Congress except about what happened personally in one’s district. You might get some information from your own congressman about the goings-on in Washington, D.C., but other than that, state legislators wouldn’t hear much, if anything. Governor Jim Thompson had a state office in the nation’s capital. I could argue about its effectiveness, but the fact is Illinois had an executive presence. Thompson’s small Washington staff kept the governor and his people in the state Bureau of the Budget informed about what was happening in the capital. I visited that office a couple of times when I was on business for the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). A polite way of putting it would be to say I did not receive a welcoming reception; Thompson ’s people in Washington didn’t want to share any information with the legislature. They thought if Illinois was to get any news about Washington, it was going to come through the governor’s office, period. Illinois legislators were thus increasingly unhappy with the flow of information about Washington to the legislative branch of government in Springfield. So in 1980, after one of my trips to Washington, I talked to Bill Redmond , Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, about it. I said, “We’re not getting the kind of information we should be getting from Washington, and the governor’s people are playing it pretty close to the vest. I’m going down to talk to Thompson and either loosen them up enough to get what we want from them or perhaps do our own office.” He asked what I thought. I said I preferred to have our own office. He replied, “Let’s go get it.” So Redmond and I walked downstairs and sprung the idea on the governor, and somewhat to my surprise, Thompson offered going national and beefing up our party 105 no resistance. He didn’t have any problem with it. He just said, “You get it passed and get it on my desk and I’ll sign it.” I told him that was all I asked. Redmond and I engineered a larger appropriation for the Commission for Intergovernmental Cooperation to staff the office, and we opened our Illinois legislative office in September 1980. Five other state legislatures had an office in Washington: New York, Ohio, California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.1 Then we came along from Illinois, and we all ended up in the same building, in the Hall of the States at 444 N. Capitol Street in Washington, which is also where Thompson’s office was located. We were within walking distance from the U.S. Capitol. But we didn’t get down to serious business for a few months, until February or so, after Reagan was sworn in. Frankly, we were preoccupied for a while; that was the year that Thompson tried to take over the Senate. President Reagan made it apparent during this time that he had a plan for the states in terms of the money they received from the federal government. He was going to take a whole host of programs, such as special education, mental health, and other social services, and lump them together in what he called “block grant” programs. Instead of having the money follow each of those individual programs, he would lump the funds all together and give them to the states. We could spread the money around however we wanted, within some broad guidelines. We couldn’t take human service money and use it for roads, for instance. Atthattime,IwasalsoveryactivewithintheNCSL.Ihadbeenrecruited based on a recommendation some years earlier from Senator Russell Arrington . The former Republican state senator from Illinois had been a big influence in the early years of the legislative leaders’ conference. Before he died, he had talked to a number of those people, encouraging them to get me involved. He said that I was going to be in the Senate as long as I wanted, and he predicted that I would become one of the leaders. He thought it would be a good idea for Illinois to have somebody positioned at the national level. Those in the NCSL were very kind and...

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