Sign Here

The Tribune echoes my post of the other day urging the Governor to simply sign the pay to play ban, but not surprisingly, they said it in a much more eloquent manner.

There is one thing the legislature did do right. It sent to the governor an ethics bill.

Yes, you heard right. An ethics bill. In Illinois. Pick yourself off the floor. It's not law yet. The governor apparently has his own mischief in mind...

It's a good bill. But Blagojevich has been warming up a familiar ruse: He's been hinting that, instead of signing the bill, he'll send it back to lawmakers with "improvements" they won't be able to swallow. In Springfield, that's called "loving a bill to death."

It's transparently bogus...

Blagojevich could save himself some embarrassment—and maybe even regain some trust of Democrats and Republicans—if he would just sign the bill.

Politics being what it is, I completely understand and accept the Governor trying to spin the issue to take shots at me. (The fact that his spin is wholly misleading and unrelated to the issue at hand is just par for the course. Although, with Carol Ronen off collecting her super-sized pension, and Ronen v2.0, aka Rebecca Rausch, now off the clock, it remains to seen who the Governor will call in from the attack dog bullpen. )

The bill has a January 1 effective date, which means that any amendatory veto would still be overridden in time to keep the bill on track to go into law when the General Assembly intended. In light of this, any attempts to rewrite the bill amount to a futile effort to delay the inevitable.

But putting our differences aside, the Governor signing the bill would not only be the right thing for him to do, it would go a long way in showing that he has the ability to do the right thing when it is put in front of him.

One day, he'll be gone. One day, I'll be gone. But before that happens, pay to play politics should be gone as well.