You know ... I think I can honestly say that I will miss our outgoing governor. At least on some issues. And if you'd told me that I would say that about any Republican in this day and age, I'd have laughed in your face. However, Ryan has been willing to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. He shut down Illinois executions when the state started releasing more than it was executing, and now he's going out on a limb for gay rights. (Although he picked a damned peculiar place to do it. If it works, the law will talk about vehicular and sexual orientation discrimination, which is just weird.) Now that he's officially a lame duck, thanks to the Great License Scandal That Would Not Die, he seems to have gotten a second wind, so to speak.
Of course, the issue is whether this is part of his call for the Republicans to move to the center, or whether this is an interesting way to kill the bill. After all, gay rights is a position that would, historically speaking, be way out on the left flank of even the Democratic party.
The other issue coming up soon in his term is the permanent disposition of executions in Illinois. The task force charged with making recommendations came back with its first wave earlier this year, and is due to make a final report in September or October. Given what they said in the first batch, it wouldn't surprise me if they simply recommended that executions in this state be ended, but that will never get through this legislature. At a minimum, they'll recommend radical changes in the process; it will be interesting to see how much of his waning political capital Ryan spends to get their recommendations enacted. And if he has time; this will be his last full legislative season, after all. A year from November, we vote in a new governor, and that following January, Ryan goes off into political retirement.
And the people who would replace him are already calling for a return to the conservative roots of the party. Never mind that Illinois rejected Mr Compassionate Conservative rather emphatically. (And yes, that was primarily pushed by Chicago, but there are more registered voters outside the city than inside it, they trend Republican, and the state still went for Gore. So it would seem that, on average, the state doesn't want to be all that conservative.) I can't imagine, somehow, that Jim Ryan (no relation to the Gov) would have supported a suspension of the death penalty, given his disgraceful oversight of the Rolando Cruz case.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!