Trib continues to thump irrelevant gov

The Chicago Tribune wails on the Governor today . . . you'd think we'd written this on Illinois Review, but then, we'd be called a "right wing rag blog", wouldn't we?

A governor then essentially has three options (we're discounting a few odder imaginings): He can admit that, given how democracy works, the game is over and the legislators won. Or he can go to court, arguing that the budget passed over his veto is unbalanced and thus unconstitutional. Hynes says judges, if they concur, can order legislators to fix the budget by adjusting spending or revenue. Fair enough.

Option three, Hynes observes, is for the governor to order a shutdown of the state agencies under his control -- which is most of them. That sort of exercise in chest-pounding would let a governor proclaim his heroism ("I'm Gov. Robin Hood, feared by the bad, loved by the good!") in demanding a budget rewrite that is Just So.

Maybe Hynes is over-reading Blagojevich's threat. Maybe the governor doesn't entertain goofy notions of closing state offices (ooh, the theatrics ...) or pulling Illinois Gaming Board agents off the boats they monitor (wowzer, imagine the public hubbub if the casinos close -- which they'd have to do, at a loss of $2 million-plus in state and local tax revenues each day!).

Link: Stick to 'irrelevant,' Governor -- chicagotribune.com.