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Her selection was foreshadowed weeks ago, after the website IrishCentral reported she was set to soon be revealed as Bidens choice, fueling speculation about her future. At the time, two people with knowledge of the process told the Globe that the five-term lawmaker from Easton was being vetted by the Biden administration.

I am deeply honored to be nominated by President Biden for ambassador to Ireland, especially given the Presidents and my own Irish roots, Cronin said in a statement released by the White House Wednesday. If confirmed, I look forward to serving as ambassador and working with our partners in Ireland on both the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.

Her selection could remix House Speaker Ronald Marianos relatively new leadership team. As the Houses majority leader, Cronin was the first woman to be named the chambers number two Democrat, and she has been viewed in the State House as a potential successor to Mariano.

Cronin previously chaired the Legislatures judiciary committee, where she helped usher a sweeping criminal justice overhaul into law in 2018, and last year she was among the Houses chief negotiators on a high-profile police accountability bill.

Elected to the House in 2012, Cronin is also a lawyer and served as an arbitrator in a landmark Catholic clergy sexual-abuse settlement.

Cronin has been among a few people viewed as potential nominees for the post in Ireland, including former US senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Anne Finucane of Bank of America. If confirmed, she would live at an estate in Dublins Phoenix Park, surrounded by 62 acres of lawn and gardens. The property was once described by The New York Times as one of Dublins most spectacular houses.

She is among a second slate of ambassador nominees announced by the Biden administration, which last week unveiled picks for a series of sensitive posts in Mexico and Israel and at NATO.

Cronin is set to join a long list of former Massachusetts elected officials nominated to be diplomats.

Former governor Paul Cellucci left the State House to serve as President George W. Bushs ambassador to Canada, just a few years after his predecessor, former governor Bill Weld, resigned after he was nominated by President Clinton to be ambassador to Mexico. (Weld ultimately withdrew after he was blocked from having a hearing by conservative Republicans in the US Senate.)

Former US senator Scott Brown served as ambassador to New Zealand in the Trump administration; former Boston mayor Ray Flynn was ambassador to the Holy See under Clinton; and former congressman and onetime gubernatorial candidate Brian Donnelly was named ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, also under Clinton.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this story misstated Cronins role in a landmark Catholic clergy sexual abuse settlement. She was an arbitrator. The Globe regrets the error.

Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mattpstout.

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Claire Cronin, Mass. Houses number two Democrat, will be nominated as ambassador to Ireland - The Boston Globe

It is often hard to try to derive a national message from a single byelection. The effect on party morale usually dwarfs that felt on government policy. The election of Liberal Democrat Sarah Green as the MP for Chesham and Amersham, a commuter-belt seat north-west of London, stuns on both counts. The result will make Conservative MPs in relatively liberal and educated constituencies very jumpy. But it will also slow the progress of Boris Johnsons planning reforms. Voters in bucolic Buckinghamshire plainly feared that these would make it easier for developers to concrete over the countryside.

What the result shows is that the Liberal Democrat cause is not a hopeless one. With just 11 parliamentarians and languishing at 7% in national polls, Sir Ed Davey appeared to be taking his depleted ranks and marching them towards the sound of gunfire. Chesham and Amersham has been held by the Conservatives since its creation in 1974. Yet Ms Green overturned a 16,000-strong Tory majority to take the seat by just over 8,000 votes, a swing of 25%, and upset the odds. The energy of the Tories vaccine bounce seems dissipated. Clearly the death of Liberal England has been prematurely foretold.

But is this a successful revival or a false dawn? In 2016 a swing of 22% saw Londons Richmond Park won by the Lib Dems. Three years later the party won the Brecon and Radnorshire byelection in Wales with a swing of 14%. What was telling was that on both occasions, the Lib Dems benefited from electoral pacts that consolidated a part of the remain vote. These divisions have not been erased just because Britain has left the European Union. Chesham and Amersham voted remain, and it would appear that substantial numbers of pro-EU Labour supporters voted Lib Dem.

The Compass thinktank has identified two clear battlegrounds in England: one between Labour and the Conservatives, another between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. There are few seats where Labour and the Lib Dems square off. It makes sense to join hands to defeat a common enemy. This thought also dovetails with a creeping political realignment in British politics.

The trend is for older, school-leaver Brexit supporters in the north switching to the Conservatives while the ruling party is losing ground among the more middle-class suburban graduates who leaned towards remain. Mr Johnsons divisive nationalism and levelling up rhetoric risks trading red wall gains, such as in Hartlepool last month, for blue wall losses. The new Tory coalition can be divided in other ways: the HS2 high-speed railway is widely welcomed in the north and the Midlands where it ends, but less so in the leafy southern constituencies, such as Chesham and Amersham, that it runs through.

To keep the momentum going will require more than the politics of protest. Sir Ed must see the possibility of a major political restructuring and shape it. He should make a virtue of positions that decentralise power, free the individual citizen and promote quality in public services. He needs policies that are not only popular but also clearly associated in the minds of voters with the Lib Dems. Being a responsible partner to the EU, rather than a troublesome neighbour, would be a good start. Liberalism is its own creed, and its adherents ought to make the case that it remains the one most capable of meeting the challenges ahead.

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The Guardian view on the Liberal Democrats: seeing and shaping politics - The Guardian

Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said that hes exploring the idea of a one-time tax on the wealth of the richest Americans as Democrats seek to increase taxes on the rich in order to pay for spending priorities.

In an interview with The Hill on Friday, Suozzi said hes in the early stages of looking at what he called a patriot tax. This would be a one-time surcharge of 2.5 percent on wealth between $50 million and $100 million and a 5 percent tax on wealth above $100 million. Wealthy people would be able to pay the tax over five years.

Research provided by Suozzis office estimates that such a tax could raise about $450 billion.

Suozzi said that the surcharge hes exploring would reflect the fact that many wealthy Americans were less hurt by the coronavirus pandemic than people with less income.

We all know that people who are wealthy did very well during the pandemic and people that were low-income people did not do well, he said.

He said that for wealthy people, the surcharge would be a way to help your country to build back better.

Suozzi has yet to introduce any legislation based on his idea, and the tax he's considering could face challenges with being enacted. The Biden administration has not endorsed proposals for wealth taxes, and the idea would be sure to face opposition from Republicans.

Suozzi said that the revenue raised by the tax could help to offset the cost of President BidenJoe BidenObama: Ensuring democracy 'continues to work effectively' keeps me 'up at night' New Jersey landlords prohibited from asking potential tenants about criminal records Overnight Defense: Pentagon pulling some air defense assets from Middle East | Dems introduce resolution apologizing to LGBT community for discrimination | White House denies pausing military aid package to Ukraine MOREs infrastructure proposals, as well as restoring the full state and local tax deduction, a top priority for the New York congressman and other lawmakers in his state.

Suozzi spoke to The Hill days after ProPublica published a report detailing how prominent U.S. billionaires pay little in taxes when compared to their wealth gains. The U.S. federal tax system is based on income, not wealth.

Democrats in recent years have increasingly floated ideas aimed at making the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes. The idea from Suozzi, a member of the moderate, bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, has some similarities to wealth taxes proposed by progressive lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenDemocrats have turned solidly against gas tax Overnight Health Care: Takeaways on the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision | COVID-19 cost 5.5 million years of American life | Biden administration investing billions in antiviral pills for COVID-19 Democratic senatorspressPhRMA over COVID-19 lobbying efforts MORE (D-Mass.), but Warrens proposal would create an annual tax rather than a one-time tax.

Suozzis comments also come amid a debate over how to pay for infrastructure spending. Biden has called for paying for his two proposed packages, which combined would cost about $4 trillion, through tax increases on high-income households and corporations. Republicans, however, oppose rolling back their 2017 tax-cut law.

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Exclusive: Democrat exploring 'patriot tax' on multimillionaires' wealth | TheHill - The Hill

Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.

A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.

The 73-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.

The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.

In part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joseph R. Biden Jr.s support with voters of color who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.

Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to keep the economy shut down, or worse. The party leaned too heavily on anti-Trump rhetoric, the report concludes.

Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020, the report states. In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would burn down your house and take away the police.

Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who lost re-election in South Florida in November, said in an interview that she had spoken with the authors of the report and raised concerns about Democratic outreach to Hispanic voters and the partys failure to rebut misinformation in Spanish-language media.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has in some ways lost touch with our electorate, Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said. There is this assumption that of course people of color, or the working class, are going to vote for Democrats. We can never assume anything.

The report, chiefly written by a pair of veteran Democratic operatives, Marlon Marshall and Lynda Tran, is among the most significant salvos yet in the Democratic Partys internal debate about how it should approach the 2022 elections. It may stir skepticism from some quarters because of the involvement of Third Way, which much of the left regards with hostility.

A fourth group that initially backed the study, the campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, backed away this spring. Tiffany Muller, the head of the group, said it had to abandon its involvement to focus instead on passing the For the People Act, a sweeping good-government bill that is stuck in the Senate.

Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran, as well as the groups sponsoring the review, have begun to share its conclusions with Democratic lawmakers and party officials in recent days, including Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

The study spanned nearly six months of research and data analysis that scrutinized about three dozen races for the House and the Senate, and involved interviews with 143 people, including lawmakers, candidates and pollsters, people involved in assembling the report said. Among the campaigns reviewed were the Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as House races in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas, and in rural New Mexico and Maine.

The study follows an internal review conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that was unveiled last month. Both projects found that Democratic candidates had been hobbled by flawed polling and pandemic-imposed limitations on campaigning.

In the D.C.C.C. report, the committee attributed setbacks at the congressional level to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to attacks calling them police-hating socialists.

Some lawmakers on the left have complained that criticism of left-wing messaging amounts to scapegoating activists for the partys failures.

Yet the review by Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund goes further in diagnosing the partys messaging as deficient in ways that may have cost Democrats more than a dozen seats in the House. Its report offers a blunt assessment that in 2020, Republicans succeeded in misleading voters about the Democratic Partys agenda and that Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as though they are a monolithic, left-leaning group.

Representative Tony Crdenas of California, who last year helmed the Congressional Hispanic Caucuss political action committee, embraced that critique of Democratic messaging and said the party should discard the assumption that voters of color are inherently more progressive.

Thats been a ridiculous idea and thats never been true, Mr. Crdenas said, lamenting that Republicans had succeeded in trying to confuse Latino voters with the socialism message, things of that nature, defund the police.

Quentin James, the president of the Collective PAC, said it was clear that some of the rhetoric we see from coastal Democrats had been problematic. Mr. James pointed to the activist demand to defund the police as especially harmful, even with supporters of policing overhauls.

We did a poll that showed Black voters, by and large, vastly support reforming the police and reallocating their budgets, Mr. James said. That terminology defund was not popular in the Black community.

Kara Eastman, a progressive Democrat who lost her bid for a House seat based in Omaha, said Republicans had succeeded in delivering a barrage of messages that tarred her and her party as being outside the mainstream. Ms. Eastman said she had told the authors of the 2020 review that she believed those labels were particularly damaging to women.

Matt Bennett, a Third Way strategist, said the party needed to be far better prepared to mount a defense in the midterm campaign.

We have got to take very seriously these attacks on Democrats as radicals and stipulate that they land, Mr. Bennett said. A lot of this just didnt land on Joe Biden.

Democrats maintained a large advantage with voters of color in the 2020 elections, but the report identified telling areas of weakness. Mr. Biden and other Democrats lost ground with Latino voters relative to the partys performance in 2016, especially among working-class and non-college voters in these communities, the report found.

The report found that a surge in Asian American turnout appeared to have secured Mr. Bidens victory in Georgia but that Democratic House candidates ran behind Mr. Biden with Asian American voters in contested California and Texas races. In some important states, Democrats did not mobilize Black voters at the same rate that Republicans did conservative white voters.

A substantial boost in turnout netted Democrats more raw votes from Black voters than in 2016, but the explosive growth among white voters in most races outpaced these gains, the report warns.

There has been no comparable self-review on the Republican side after the partys severe setbacks last year, mainly because G.O.P. leaders have no appetite for a debate about Mr. Trumps impact.

The Republican Party faces serious political obstacles, arising from Mr. Trumps unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the countrys growing diversity. Many of the partys policies are unpopular, including cutting social-welfare and retirement-security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.

Yet the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward the G.O.P., because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College.

Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.

Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.

We need to continue to show the American people what weve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing, Ms. Sherrill said.

Largely unaddressed in the report is the immense deficit Democrats face among lower-income white voters. In its conclusion, however, Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran write that Democrats need to deliver a message that includes working-class whites and matches the G.O.P.s clear collective gospel about low taxes and military strength.

Our gospel should be about championing all working people including but not limited to white working people and lifting up our values of opportunity, equity, inclusion, they write.

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Democratic Report Raises 2022 Alarms on Messaging and Voter Outreach - The New York Times

A new day of cooperation and collaboration between Democrats and Republicans promised by Illinois House Speaker Emanuel Chris Welch in January has begun. Or it hasnt.

It all depends on whom you ask in the chamber or in the governors office.

After the General Assemblys spring session concluded last week, Democrats who hold super-majorities in the House and Senate say they succeeded, for the most part, in carrying out a legislative agenda focused on children, working people, racial and ethnic equity and ethics reform.

They said they did it all in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that limited in-person meetings and contributed to an end-of-session frenzy of activity, and the new House speaker believes a new day has dawned.

I think its gone quite well, said Welch, D-Hillside, who was chosen by House members in January after longtime Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, suspended his campaign for another two-year term.

We wouldnt have accomplished the monumental things that we accomplished without collaboration and partnership, Welch said. This is a session we can be proud of.

More: Pritzker defends new Illinois budget pushed through by Dems with $1 billion in projects

Republicans, on the other hand, were able to work with Democrats on some issues. But on the big ones such as the budget Republicans said decisions reached were as partisan as ever and maybe even more so this year.

They noted that Democrats included money for a $1,200 legislative pay raise Republicans didnt want in a more than 3,000-page budget bill filed a day or less daybefore it passed the House and Senate with no Republican votes.

That was classic Mike Madigan, classic 65th and Pulaski style, House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, R-Western Springs, said, referring to the street address of Madigans 13th Ward office in Chicago, where he remains the committeeman.

Earlier: Cannabis legislation to diversify industry approved by Illinois Senate, heads to Pritzker

Republicans said they were left out of final negotiations on the budget, and they disagreed with the way Democrats handled the drawing of new legislative and Illinois Supreme Court maps.

They said the sun heralding a new day in Springfield hasnt begun to peek above the horizon. The result for everyday citizens, they said, has been overspending, massive pension debt, a less-than-favorable business climate and taxes that are higher than necessary.

At the end of the day, its the same process weve seen for years, said Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield.

These massive pieces of legislation get dropped at the last minute, in the waning hours of session, he said. Its not a very good way to have productive public policy when we have bills that are thousands of pages that no one really has the opportunity to review before theyre voted on.

Democrats hold a 73-45 majority in the House and a 41-18 majority in the Senate.

When the Democrats have such an advantage in the legislature with the super-majority, they really dont care to engage the Republicans a whole lot because they can just do it themselves with their own votes, Butler said.

In politics, unfortunately,rhetoric and promises are one thing, and the way people conduct themselves while in office seems to be often a different thing, he said.

Democrats, sometimes on a bipartisan basis, spearheaded a litany of bills now headed to the desk of Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat. Democrats say the legislation would enact a balanced budget, pay down debts, expand affordable housing, providemore families subsidies for child care, reduce the states backlog of bills and make the full, scheduled pension payment.

Democrats said legislation they passed to enact the $42.3 billion state budget, an essentially flat spending planfor the fiscal year to begin July 1, also would set more money aside for educating public school students, expand Medicaid services, boost social services and help businesses harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another bill would create more economic opportunity for women and minorities in Illinois legal cannabis industry, Democrats said.

The Medicaid expansion to cover more health services received wide bipartisan support. And Republicans contributed some votes to the cannabis legislation, which gives more latitude for existing dispensaries to relocate and attempts to give people from low-income, high-crime neighborhoods more opportunity to win state-awarded cannabis licenses.

Welch, 50, the states first Black speaker, succeeded the 79-year-old Madigan after Madigan presided over the House for all but two years between 1983 and 2021.

Welch said the House passed a responsible, balanced budget and moved our state … a little bit closer toward racial and gender equity, led by the most diverse leadership team this body has ever had.

Welch said he isnt being critical of Madigan, one of his political mentors, when he said he has been more accessible to Republican and Democratic members of the chamber than Madigan was.

I believe in a more collaborative approach, Welch said. I believe in democracy. I believe in giving people a voice in this process, and I think if you ask around on both sides of the aisle, they will tell you they had plenty of opportunity to shape what happened here in this last session.

But Butler said Welch, like Madigan, spent little time on the House floor, while Durkin spent much more of his days there.

We didnt see a lot of the speaker, which is straight out of Madigans playbook, Butler said. He stays in his office all day long and posts stuff on social media, but we rarely see him on the floor. … This business is about relationships, and if the speaker is not around to continue to build relationships, then it makes it difficult to be productive.

Welch said Butlers criticism isnt fair.

My days started very early, and they ended very late, he said. Being speaker of the House means youre basically the CEO of the chamber. It takes a lot of work, a lot of time, very intense, and so when Im on the floor, its for a specific purpose. But when Im not on the floor, Im doing the work of the House, keeping the trains on the tracks. And so I think that no matter who is the speaker, youre not going to find them on the floor very much just because of the nature of the job and responsibilities that it entails.

Rep. Dan Brady, R-Bloomington, who has served in the House since 2001, said he had hopes for more collaboration with Democrats, but by the middle of the session, the process was noticeably more rocky, noticeably more partisan.

Lawmakers having to discuss issues and meet so often on Zoom rather than face to face and rarely spend free time together may have contributed to the situation, Brady said.

Sen. Steve McClure, R-Springfield, said: This is the most partisan spring session Ive experienced. Ive only been here for three sessions, but out of the three, this was the most partisan.

Welch pushed aside Republican criticisms regarding the state budget andmap-making, a process that must take place at least once every 10 years.

Though Republicans disagreed, Welch said lawmakers had a constitutional mandate to complete legislative maps by June 30.

Not meeting that deadline, the speaker said, would have thrown the process to a bipartisan commission that likely would have deadocked, triggering the drawing of a name out of a hat that would have given Republicans a 50-50 chance of being able to enact their own map.

Pritzker signed the map into law Friday. Its expected to be challenged in court before all members of the General Assembly are up for election in 2022.

Welch defended the Democrats use of American Community Survey estimates of population for the map, rather than decennial Census results, because the results arent expected until mid-August.

He and Pritzker faulted Republicans for not coming up with their own map proposal. Republicans said ACS data, the only information available, would be inaccurate, and they continued to call for creation of an independent map-drawing commission that both Welch and Pritzker supported in the past.

Read this: U.S. Congressman Rodney Davis puts pressure on Gov. JB Pritzker to veto legislative maps

The two men said an amendment to the state constitution would be required to create the commission, and though they supported an amendment, the legislature never agreed to put one on the ballot. And the men didnt support Republicans plan to create a commission through existing constitutional provisions or through a new law.

Regarding the budget, Welch said the end-of-session finalizing of details for the budget was unavoidable. He disagreed with calling the budget a last-minute endeavor, saying Republicans are pushing a false narrative.

The budget bill was filed the night before votes were taken May 31 in the House. The Senate passed the bill early on June 1.

Welch said lawmakers had plenty of time to go through it, and that was at the culmination of weeks and months of negotiations of what would go in there.

Republicans said they werent a real partner with Democrats on the budget. Welch pushed back.

We offered them an opportunity to be a partner in everything, he said. They chose what they wanted to be a part of. They helped us with ethics. We got ethics done. They helped us with cannabis. We got cannabis done. They helped us with affordable housing. We got affordable housing done. They helped us with Medicaid. We got Medicaid done.

They pushed away from the table on the budget. They pushed away from the table on redistricting. They cant pick and choose what they want to be a part of and then complain its the Democrats fault. They have to take some responsibility in their own decision-making.

Both Republicans and Democrats said they want to see even more ethics reforms passed beyond the bill headed to Pritzkers desk. the bill would bar elected officials from lobbying other units of government and put some rules in place to interrupt the revolving door of lawmakers leaving and then returning to lobby the General Assembly.

Butler said the dysfunction Republicans continue to see in the legislature may slow progress toward further ethics reforms.

We can continue to work on ethics and do it the right way over the summer, but I doubt that will happen, he said. The Illinois legislature seems incapable of doing it in a fashion that is collaborative and involves a lot of stakeholders when it comes to an issue like that.

Rep. La Shawn Ford, D-Chicago, one of House Democrats budget negotiators, said he plans to work to give lawmakers and the public more time to sift through and evaluate future budget bills.

The current process has to change, he said, adding that many Democrats share Republicans frustration with voting on a final budget with 24 hours notice or less.

However, Ford said the public needs to consider Republicans motives when hearing their complaints about Welch.

The Republicans probably would never recognize change unless theres a change in party power, Ford said.

He said Republicans should be happy that the budget contains many things they like, including preservation of the Invest In Kids tax credit for donors wanting to assist children with scholarships to private schools, a $350 million boost in the school aid formula, and more money for hospitals.

The final budget didnt provide for eliminating all nine of the tax breaks that Pritzker wanted when he unveiled his budget proposal in February. The Invest in Kids credit was one of them.

Democrats were able to pass the budget without Republicans being forced to take tough votes on a budget that contained measures they didnt like, Ford said.

Madigan sometimes would force overtime sessions to pressure Republicans to contribute votes to the Democratic majority on controversial bills, Ford said.

Ford also gave credit to Welch for allowing changes in House rules that give Republicans more input. Republicans dont think enough has changed, but Ford said more progress will take time.

The state cannot afford for Welch to come in and tear down everything in place, Ford said. This is an incremental change. … It was a successful run for Speaker Welch.

Welch, Pritzker and other Democrats benefited from an unexpectedly swift upturn in the states economy and accompanying state tax revenues as COVID-19 cases declined and vaccines were deployed.

The state also will receive about $8.4 billion through the federal American Rescue Plan, with $1.5 million put to use in the fiscal 2022 budget, another $1 billion going toward capital projects in lawmakers districts, and almost $6 million yet to be appropriated.

Republicans complained that the $1 billion in projects apparently will be doled out by Democratic lawmakers. But Pritzker said the allocation of that money hasnt been completed. Republicans can influence where the money goes by contacting Democratic lawmakers, he said.

Related: Pritzker budget plan keeps spending flat, closes $900 million in 'corporate loopholes'

Republicans said the state has more than enough money to preserve the nine corporate tax breaks and help companies fuel the economic recovery.

But the breaks that were eliminated in the budget bill will save $655 million annually and begin to chip away at the states long-term structural deficit, Pritzker said.

Through the bill, the governor said Democrats acted responsibly when the Republicans wanted us to spend the one-time federal dollars to try to stick up for their benefactors, the wealthy corporations.

Even though the General Assembly continues to negotiate a clean-energy bill affecting Chicago-based Exelon and utilities throughout the state, Pritzker and Welch said the session was successful.

News: Downstate lawmakers, unions, nonprofit utilities wary of 'zero-carbon future' legislation

This is a testament to the fact that theres a real effort here to put Illinois in a great position going forward, Pritzker said.

Republicans, on the other hand, said Democratic control of state government will only perpetuate political scandals, and the redistricting fight was emblematic of whats at stake.

Durkin said citizens desperately want honesty in government. Rep. Tom Demmer, R-Dixon, said Democrats No. 1 goal during the session was gerrymandered maps.

Their true priority this year was to maintain their political advantage, Demmer said. He said Democrats handling of redistricting was a demonstration that we continue to govern through a system of brinkmanship. Its inappropriate.

Contact Dean Olsen: dolsen@gannett.com; (217) 836-1068; twitter.com/DeanOlsenSJR.

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Promised 'new day' in Illinois House debatable in a session with plenty of disagreements - The State Journal-Register