SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Tired, angry legislators have put aside their many differences and managed to back Gov. Rod Blagojevich into a corner. Now they’re waiting to see whether he’ll try to fight his way out or compromise.

The maneuver came Friday, after five months of futile negotiations, when lawmakers passed a state budget that Blagojevich opposes.

Few of them call it a great budget. It doesn’t fix the state’s financial problems and might even make them worse. But it offers a nice chunk of money to schools and takes care of the basics, and that’s enough for lawmakers who have given up hope of getting anything better.

Illinois hasn’t had a budget since July 31. Unpaid bills are piling up and schools are waiting for state aid.

So the spotlight is on Blagojevich and what he’ll do when the budget formally reaches his desk.

He can:

• sign it and spend the next six months accusing the General Assembly of sending him a rotten budget and ignoring the needs of the people.
• sign it and then work with lawmakers on other issues, gaining leverage from his control over the money in the budget.
• reject it, either entirely or in part, and continue a five-month budget battle that threatens to interfere with government services.

Blagojevich has a long history of finding villains to rail against. He could choose to sign the budget, give up on passing any of his other initiatives and blame the Legislature for forcing it on him. He could tell the public that lawmakers turned their backs on the need for health care, for safe roads and bridges, for efficient mass transit.

But that approach involves at least two major risks.

One is that the public would associate him, rather than lawmakers, with those failures. For many people, the governor is the face of Illinois government, and he’s to blame for everything it does wrong.

The other risk is that Blagojevich would permanently cripple his ability to pass legislation. Lawmakers have already discovered they can go around him to pass a budget and ignore his orders for special sessions. If the feud gets any worse, they might decide to ignore him entirely.

Rep. Gary Hannig, D-Litchfield, advises Blagojevich to sign the budget and then use it to get what he wants. After all, even under a signed budget, the money doesn’t get spent until the governor says so.

“He would still retain the final authority to say yes or no to those things in the budget, for the most part, but he would be saying, ‘I’m trying to move in your direction,”‘ said Hannig, a top lieutenant to House Speaker Michael Madigan.

The budget contains millions of dollars for projects in each legislator’s district. It also includes money for local prisons, new social services and tourism grants. All of those are potential bargaining chips.

Lawmakers also want a huge package of construction money to build new roads, bridges and schools. They need the governor’s cooperation to get it, just as they need his help coming up with aid for the Chicago area’s cash-strapped transit systems.

These items give Blagojevich leverage, but they’re things he wants, too – and maybe even needs politically.

He also wants to pass his plan to guarantee that everyone in the state has access to health insurance, although he hasn’t talked about it much in the last couple of weeks. There’s no sign lawmakers will suddenly embrace it after months of suspicion, but building some good will could help the governor salvage part of the plan.

That would be a change in approach for the combative governor. More in keeping with his style would be rejecting the budget and demanding lawmakers send him something better.

He could do that with an outright veto, but that would almost certainly be overridden in short order and the budget would become law.

He could use his amendatory veto powers to get creative – for instance, by slicing out all the pork projects that lawmakers have included. That would put the Legislature in the awkward position of publicly restoring the money while other programs get shortchanged.

Or Blagojevich could chop the budget down so that it lasts just a month or two. He could argue that lawmakers should accept the temporary budget while everyone works to come up with something better – something that includes health care and construction money.

From his perspective, one problem with any sort of veto is that lawmakers could override it quickly. After all, the budget passed by overwhelming veto-proof margins.

So Blagojevich might consider doing nothing at all – just leaving the budget to sit on his desk. He can do that for 60 days before the legislation becomes law without his signature. Maybe he would argue that he needs time to review such a complicated document, so lawmakers should send him a temporary budget to keep government running in the meantime.

But that’s a dangerous maneuver when the state has no budget. Blagojevich could find himself facing public anger and the prospect of a government shutdown.

This budget battle began in March, when Blagojevich delivered a bold plan to improve health care, increase education funding and cut pension debt with the largest tax increase in Illinois history.

Piece by piece, legislators said “no” to his plan. Now they’ve left him with a short list of ugly options.

The governor and his staff weren’t discussing those options this weekend, but lawmakers hoped he was ready to change course.

“Sign the bills you need to sign and come back with your agenda and try again next year,” urged Rep. Bill Black, R-Danville. “That is what compromise is all about.”