The state legislators negotiating a massive new energy reform bill for Illinois are said to have made real progress at their Tuesday working group meeting this past week. Shortly before the meeting began, a legislator who is a longtime union ally and involved in the talks told me the consensus was that “a pound of flesh” would have to be extracted from Exelon, which wants more subsidies for two nuclear power plants and has been under a dark ethics cloud as the U.S. attorney’s office probes it and its subsidiary ComEd’s Statehouse activities. Well, lawmakers may want to increase the weight of that flesh to be extracted after a routine federal court hearing was rocked by a bombshell that could complicate the negotiations.