SPRINGFIELD — State lawmakers aren’t giving themselves high marks for 2015.

State Rep. Mark Batinick (R-Plainfield) says he’s been asked by constituents to give a grade to the General Assembly and Gov. Bruce Rauner.

(Credit: Henryk Sadura)
(Credit: Henryk Sadura)

According to Batinick, you’ve got two options: you either have to give them an I”” for incomplete, or an “F.”

Batinick doesn’t believe the legislature accomplished much, considering the state will go half the fiscal year without a budget in place. It’s not a scenario he envisioned when the session began.

He said he expected there would be more time spent rolling up the sleeves and figuring out how to solve our problems as opposed to the political side of things.

State Sen. Kwame Raoul (D-Chicago) agrees if you’re judging the legislature from the budget, the grade should be an F, but he does think there are legislative victories to celebrate, like several laws passed regarding policing and criminal justice.

Raoul says they may not be sexy media topics, but there are hundreds of pieces of legislation that are passed year after year by way of cooperation between legislators, and If you factor those things in there, hopefully they get above a failing grade.

Lawmakers will return to Springfield on January 13.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>