Live from the State House! It's Rod Blagojevich's greatest hits

So guess who was in Springfield, Illinois, on Thursday.

Mrs. TVB and I were coming here anyway, because she's going to be giving talks on Abraham Lincoln and women's suffrage for the Kansas Humanities Council soon, and we wanted to visit the Lincoln Presidential Museum before she hit the hustings. (It's a great museum. At points it gets a little too Disney for my tastes -- everything has a lush, John Williams-esque score behind it -- but it tells its subject's story coherently and powerfully well, which a good museum these days ought to do. Plus, we got our pictures taken with Abe!)

After lunch, we wondered: What else is there to see in this town, anyway?

And that's how we wound up in Room 114 in the Illinois State Capitol watching the extraordinary proceedings of the state committee to investigate Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Now, if I'd been really tech-savvy I would've gotten on Twitter immediately, to convey to the whole world that by gosh, I am here! But I needed my phone to do some quick boning-up on the principal players in this mess and look up such acronyms as iSaveRx (a harebrained scheme the governor cooked up to buy cheap meds from abroad and wound up going nowhere, largely because it's illegal, plus the state is being sued for $2.6 million by a British supplier) and IPAM (not a high-tech cooking spray but a company that turned into a taxpayer-supported slush fund until a state audit embarrassed the gov and he cancelled their contract.)

So instead, I filled up most of a Field Notes journal with scribblings. Before we get to them, however, let me show you what the room looked like. First, here's a picture by Kristin Schmid Schuter of the New York Times:

Now, this gives you a sense of the action from the unique and utterly unduplicated perspective of the photographer, over in the pool area. (She took our picture, too, and asked for our names, so we'll see if that shows up somewhere.)

Here is how that same scene looked like to the rest of us:

At times during the afternoon (we were there from about 1:45 until the hearing ended at 4:10), there were more committee members in the room than were sitting in the gallery. There are 21 in all on the impeach-Blago panel, which is chaired by the longtime Hyde Park-South Shore rep Barbara Flynn Currie.

As we arrived, testimony was just wrapping up from administrators of the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, who were apparently there to defend the governor's decision to expand the state FamilyCare program despite the fact he had not sought the legislature's approval, which is apparently something most Illinois governors would need to do, governors not so blessed with skinny jogger's calves and thick, brushy hair as Rod Blagojevich.

As I read later, Rep. Lou Lang of Skokie had been raking the officials over the coals for not having at their fingertips the amount it had cost the state to expand FamilyCare -- funds the legislature had not approved.

Sitting at the table opposite the witnesses' table was the governor's team: curly-headed lawyer Ed Genson, who recently defended R. Kelly in his child-sex case (acquittal on all 14 counts) and seemed to have the respect of everyone in the room; next to him, his buffoonish co-counsel of his named Samuel Adam Jr. Whereas Genson looked like a documentary-ready criminal defense lawyer -- calm, confident, a little rumpled, writing notes continuously in longhand (he's a lefty) on a legal pad -- Adam looked like someone who hadn't been given enough to do. Wearing a three-piece suit complete with Donald Trump salmon necktie, he would fidget, stare at the committee, but leave the note-taking to Ed. There was a third member of the gov's team at the end of the table, a female. The fact she is not in this AP photo is not surprising. When Schuter (good name for a photog, by the way) was trying to take a shot of the table, I saw the female lawyer move her chair so that she was completely blocked by Adam's considerable head and shoulders.

As the DHFS gang were preparing to leave, Adam sprang to life with a line of questioning inquiring as to whether the FamilyCare program helped sick kids. When the response came back that it did, Adam said, "So what you're saying is that when the governor had to choose between bureaucracy and sick children, he chose sick children every time!"

The legislators, and much of the gallery, burst into loud guffaws. It was like we had been beamed into Parliament for another exciting episode of "Prime Minister's Question Time."

"This is not that kind of hearing," interrupted Currie.

Next came Bill Holland, the longtime Illinois Auditor General, to apprise the committee about the especially difficult time he's had getting timely audit information from the gov and his minions.

"The gravity of the committee's purpose is not lost on me," said Holland. Indeed, by his own count he had issued just one press release and given one press conference in 17 years in his position -- in 2005, to bring to light the mess concerning CMS, the central management agency that, as the Sun-Times colorfully put it, had become under Blago "a free-spending bureaucracy that rewarded clout-heavy contractors and improperly billed taxpayers for dinners, hotel room service and even parking for a Chicago Bulls game."

Rep. Jack Franks, a longtime nemesis of the gov's, came loaded for bear. He waved around a wad of papers and asked for time to ask more questions. Holland was careful not to go where he didn't want to go, sticking to the facts of the audit, which frankly seemed damning enough. However, when the subject turned to a companys that had apparently gotten a multi-million-dollar no-bid contract despite the fact that the company had not even existed prior to winning the contract, even Holland had to quip, "Nice work if you can get it," which elicited more laughs.

But overall, the auditor's main complaint was that Blago's people are making it hard for one of the ordinary processes of governance -- governmental accountability as measured through annual state audits -- to go forward, which of course is part of the larger paralysis that was gripping Illinois even before Patrick Fitzgerald stepped in.

"We've seen an erosion of the audit process over the last couple of years," Holland said. "Do they go beyond an audit problem? ... That's not for me to decide." But what he can say is that auditors request the same data from the same agencies every year, and it clearly frustrates Holland that state agencies are not getting it to his auditors on a timely basis anymore.

"In some cases it is purposeful," Holland concluded. "In some cases it is slipshod. In some cases it is people who are overworked and don't have time." Asked to compare to previous governors, Holland said, "We got substantially more cooperation from the Ryan and Edgar administrations."

A fair amount of time was spent on the flu vaccine debacle as well. That's when things got testy between Genson and the chair, as Chicago Public Radio documented.

The afternoon wound up with testimony from three good-government lawyers over their frustrations on a similar theme: the governor's refusal to comply with freedom-of-information requests.

Jay Stewart of Better Government Association said that when he tried to obtain copies of subpoenas that had been issued in 2006 by Fitzgerald's office -- yes, the U.S. Attorney really has been on the case a long time -- Blagojevich issued what he termed a "bizarre" denial. In questioning, Rep. Lang asked Stewart why he used the word "bizarre."

"I've been told lots of things" by officials denying FOIA requests, said Stewart. "I've never been told that 'We can't even confirm that we have this thing -- however, if we have it, the request is denied' -- I've never gotten a hypothetical denial before."

Even Attorney General Lisa Madigan urged the governor to grant the FOIA request, which Blago's legal team responded to by telling Madigan to butt out, which eventually, seeing that she wasn't going to win this one, she did. And that brings us back to Mr. Adam.

"Lisa Madigan agreed with the governor," he blustered, "So he has not actually violated the points of the FOIA, and he is still within his rights?"

Mrs. TVB later said that Mr. Adam had a point. Even though an appellate court backed the BGA, the gov still hasn't done anything wrong here. Yet.

And with that, the hearing ended and the media gaggled around Genson's motorized chair outside the committee room. I went up to Stewart and introduced myself. He told me his feeling is that the administration's problem with freedom of information is similar to its problem with timely auditing data. There's sand in the transmission, and everyone's just grinding their gears in Springfield right now.

"As the governor has gone downhill, the FOIA compliance went downhill," Stewart said.

So I asked: Does that mean the only way to get information out of the governor right now is to wiretap him?

Stewart: "Well, that or sue him. Voluntary disclosure with this governor is problematic at best."

Meanwhile, over at the gaggle, Genson was delivering a lecture on due process to the media, reminding them that Illinois has "one black eye already" and we wouldn't want to do any more damage by rushing into a hasty impeachment.

I dunno. Clearly Elvis is an early Christmas present to the news media. The longer this thing goes on, the more entertaining it gets. But is any of that good for the people of Illinois? Wouldn't the citizens of a large state trying to emerge from a culture of corruption be better served if the bum left office sooner rather than later? Let's ask Eliot.

If you'd like to join in the fun next week, the proceedings will be streamed over the internet.