One day after President Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package, Illinois House Republicans called for the General Assembly to oversee the appropriation of funds in order to support businesses and individuals hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a Friday news conference, state Reps. Tom Demmer, R-Dixon, Keith Wheeler, R-Oswego, and C.D. Davidsmeyer, R-Jacksonville, urged responsibility in the allocation of federal funding and warned against using the stimulus as a “magic bailout” to fund new state programs.

“These are dollars that are designated by the federal government to provide relief to the governments, businesses and individuals and families across the country who have been impacted by COVID-19 and the related closures and restrictions of everyday life that we’ve all been through,” Demmer said Friday.

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting Illinois’ population.

During eight months of the pandemic, 8.9 million people in the United States moved.

That’s according the United States Postal Service change of address requests.

In Illinois, 62% of moves were outbound, according to Atlas Van Lines, who tracked interstate moves during this time.

One of the unique aspects of a governmental entity going broke is that few notice — or even object — until the ship of state founders.

That’s the way it’s been with government at all levels in Illinois. Times keep getting harder and harder, eliciting little but yawns from the body politic. Meanwhile, those in charge keep the pedal to the metal as the cliff’s edge draws ever closer.

There are, of course, some fussbudgets who insist on preaching to an empty choir about the danger ahead. They are variously denounced by the powers that be as “carnival barkers” and “con men” who should be ignored.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday became the latest to rule that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring public-sector unions’ collection of collective bargaining fees from nonmembers does not mean that public employees who opted to join unions do not have to pay the dues imposed by their bargaining agreements.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims by Susan Bennett, a janitor for an Illinois school district, that once she resigned from her union in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, it should have ceased collecting dues from her paycheck.