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GOP Senators Bail Out on Principles to Bailout CTA 1/11/2008 9:57:00 AM
By Dan Proft
-Don Wade & Roma Morning Show - WLS 890-AM
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Click here to listen to an .mp3 of this commentary as heard on today morning's Don Wade & Roma Morning Show on WLS AM-890.
When asked to offer his opinion on the Illinois Republican Party, renowned conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist said, "Someone's got to be the bad example."
Thanks to the votes of three Republican State Senators for the Democrats' mass transit bailout plan, the GOP in Illinois has gone from "the bad example" to a Marx Brothers movie-except without the funny.
The good news is that Senators Groucho, Harpo and Zeppo have given the party a message to voters that it has desperately sought. The bad news is that the message is: "Vote Republican: We'll Raise Your Taxes."
The real names of the players in this Republican comedy troupe are State Senators Kirk Dillard, John Millner and Dan Cronin.
They all hail from DuPage County, the soon-to-be last bastion of Republican hegemony in Illinois if it is left to Dillard, Millner and Cronin.
By capitulating to scare tactics and voting to increase the sales tax by a quarter of a percentage point in Cook County and a half of a percentage point in the five collar counties--as they did--in order to finance an agency that has been run like a banana republic for decades, these three Republican state senators served to eliminate perhaps the most critical distinction of principle between the two parties--at least as to how the two parties operate in most of the rest of the country.
Ceding moral authority on the tax issue is the political doomsday scenario for Illinois Republicans.
Those three Republican votes--and all three were needed for the legislation to pass out of the Senate--did not only bail out a moribund regional transit agency. Their votes gave Governor Blagojevich and a host of other Democrats on the hot seat a free ride.
Do you know how politically tone-deaf you need to be to make Rod Blagojevich look good? Senators Groucho, Harpo and Zeppo do.
And Republicans in Illinois wonder why they lose?
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