Illinois pols missing a chance
Texas energy debacle has cautionary lessons
Illinois politicians are missing a golden opportunity to counter the narrative that residents are fleeing the state because of taxes, regulations and poor policy decisions.
Politicians who rule Illinois could point to the deadly energy crisis in Texas and say, “Do you see why regulations are needed? Do you realize the value of investing in government and infrastructure? You get what you pay for.”
But, no, Illinois politicians will stand there like a slugger resting a bat on his shoulder while a pitcher in a Lou Malnati’s cap underhands a 16-inch softball squarely over the plate.
Maybe Illinois leaders are too empathetic to politicize a tragedy that has reportedly killed 49 people, including an 11-year-old boy who froze to death in his bed after his mobile home went two days without electricity.
Frigid temperatures disrupted utility service to 4.5 million Texans. Some lost power for five days, causing water pipes to freeze and leaving extensive personal property damage.
A polar vortex brought the cold air, but the Texas tragedy is more than a natural disaster. Humans compounded the misery. Policymakers ignored recommendations that Texas require utility companies to winterize power grid equipment. The state seemed to have learned no lessons from previous cold snaps in 2011 and 1989.
Texans and Republicans abhor regulations. Regulations cost money and reduce profits. Whenever you hear people complain about regulations, remember: It’s always about money and
has little to do with personal freedom.
It’s usually cheaper to live in places like Texas, thanks to fewer regulations and less government spending. That is, until a costly disaster like a cold snap or a flood. Flooding is another good example.
You see, in Illinois, when homebuilders turn farmland into subdivisions, they have to comply with requirements to set aside land for water detention during heavy rains. Texas is less strict. Developers make more money, but floods cause more damage.
To add insult to injuries, now Texas consumers are getting hit with huge utility bills because providers jacked up rates when people needed energy the most. Many Texans are sharing horror stories on social media.
Shannon Marrs, who lives in a Dallas suburb, told National Public Radio her family’s electricity bill was $257 for January. Their February bill was $10,180.
You won’t hear naysayers mention excessive utility bills in Texas while they’re blaming Illinois politicians for the state’s population exodus by allegedly being anti-business and requiring deeppocketed corporations to act responsibly toward citizens and the environment.
Illinois conservatives often sound like cheerleaders for Texas and other states. Meanwhile, Chicago is losing residents while Houston is gaining population and may soon overtake the Windy City as the nation’s third most populated city.
The mood seems reminiscent of the days following a mass shooting, when gun-rights advocates seem to always win the narrative that it would be disrespectful to victims to consider discussing regulations so soon after a tragedy.
Frustrated by those who use myths and lies to bad-mouth Illinois, I sought the perspective of former Gov. Pat Quinn, a lifelong consumer advocate who helped establish the Citizens Utility Board in Illinois in 1984. Quinn is a Democrat who was governor from 2009 to 2015.
“I think what happened in Texas should be an alarm bell for all of us,” Quinn said during a telephone interview. “It’s very important that we ask the Illinois Commerce Commission what exactly our major utilities are doing with respect to resiliency.”
Resiliency refers to the reliability of the electrical grid, which Quinn called “the most complicated machine ever devised by human beings.” Most of the United States is served by two systems called the Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection. Most of Texas, however, is served by its own separate grid that is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.
I asked Quinn about the population decline in Illinois. I was like the pitcher in the Lou Malnati’s cap lobbing a softball. I gave him the opportunity to criticize conservatives who bash Illinois policy, but he barely nibbled at the bait.
Instead, he recounted how he had to share a room with then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a visit to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 to support National Guard troops serving overseas.
“I was sentenced to the harshest punishment known to man: Seven days on the road with Rick Perry, who back then was bragging about everything Texas,” Quinn said. President Donald Trump appointed the fossil fuel friendly Perry secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, which many likened to putting a fox in charge of a henhouse.
Quinn has too much integrity and humility to sling mud like other politicians. He pivoted the conversation to things that actually matter, like accountability and legislative oversight. That’s what you get when someone cares more about governance than politics.
Illinois and other states are vulnerable to the types of failures that affected Texas, Quinn said. The Illinois Commerce Commission and state legislators should call leaders of ComEd and other utilities to publicly testify about resiliency, he said.
“ComEd tells you what you want to hear, that’s how they handle things,” Quinn said. “You’ve got to probe and go beneath and really investigate and not count on the utility giving you a sweet song.”
ComEd’s media center is peppered with stories like a late January news release in which CEO Terry Donnelly said the utility was prepared for severe winter weather.
“After the historic derecho last August,” Donnelly said, “our grid investments allowed ComEd to safely restore power to half a million customers in record time, prevent nearly twice as many customers from losing service and avoid millions of dollars in customer costs.”
Back in 2003, Quinn chaired an effort called the Blackout Solutions Task Force. The panel studied ways to prevent outages and shore up the state’s power grid. That was the year a storm downed trees in Ohio and triggered a blackout that cut power to 50 million people in the Northeastern United States.
Lawmakers must be vigilant about protecting consumers and demand that utilities invest in infrastructure, Quinn said.
“These issues are life and death issues,” he said. “Something you would think as innocent as a tree falling on a power line in Cleveland set off this terrible blackout all across our country.”
In addition to receiving exorbitant utility bills, Texans continue to experience other fallout from the energy crisis. A market monitor, Potomac Economics, said Thursday that ERCOT overcharged residents by $16 billion and recommended charges be reduced. The chair of the Texas Public Utilities Commission resigned on Monday.
The state’s largest and oldest electricity co-op, Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, filed for bankruptcy after receiving a $2.1 billion energy bill from ERCOT. The ERCOT board on Thursday fired its president and CEO. The U.S. House Oversight Committee is investigating the situation.
Illinois Democrats should be telling voters, “The grass isn’t always greener. You should think carefully before moving to Texas or other states that don’t require as much regulation or investment in infrastructure and services.”
Instead, Quinn sounded more concerned about making sure Illinois leaders were actually doing enough to protect citizens and consumers.
“The Illinois Commerce Commission has a duty here, but I really think our legislators, both the House and Senate, ought to have special hearings and pull in all the utilities and have them testify exactly what their programs are to protect the infrastructure from any kind of climate disaster,” Quinn said.
A recently released toxicology report conducted by the Miami-Dade County medical examiner department showed that an aide to former U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski was speeding and legally drunk when he died in a crash in Naples, Florida on Thanksgiving morning.
Zachary Plantz, 27, was driving a vehicle shortly before 2 a.m. Nov. 26 when it struck a semi truck on U.S. 41. Police estimated he was traveling at 81 mph in 45 mph zone when he collided with the truck, which was making a U-turn, the report stated.
“During normal faculties, any driver would have been able to perceive and circumvent the collision,” police said in the investigative report. “However, Plantz’ conditions at the time of the crash hindered his cognizance of the environment, causing his own death, as well as all the property damage.”
The report said Plantz had a blood-alcohol count of 0.247% with the presence of Alprazolam, a prescription drug, in his system. The legal limit in Florida is 0.08%. Witnesses said that the vehicle Plantz was driving, a Mercedes owned by Daniel Joyce, was traveling at a high rate of speed when it hit the truck at 1:54 a.m.
The driver of the truck and his passenger were not injured.
A Plantz family member did not return a message seeking comment.
Police said Joyce told them Plantz was a family friend and had used his vehicle on multiple occasions. He said Plantz left with the vehicle Nov. 23 to visit his parents in Sanibel, an island and city in Lee County, but did not know where Plantz was heading to the morning of the fatal crash. Police said they found a credit card receipt from Cavo Lounge in Naples with an authorized payment of $48.15 at 1:15 a.m., shortly before the accident.
The death of Plantz, a native of Frankfort and a graduate of Providence Catholic and the University of Notre Dame, shocked friends and family. He was a senior policy adviser for Lipinski, who was still serving in Congress but had been defeated by Marie Newman in the March 2020 Democratic primary.
“The world has lost an incredible young man whose life was tragically cut too short,” Lipinski said in a social media post shortly after Plantz’s death. “He was a proud Notre Dame graduate who had a contagious energy about him that lifted up those who interacted with him.”
The Plantz family has many ties with the Notre
Dame football program and shortly after Zach died, the Irish offense ran for a touchdown against North Carolina using a formation in honor of Zach. Irish coach Brian Kelly said the team prayed for the Plantz family after the game.
Earlier that month, Plantz took part in a fundraising challenge for men’s health and mental health and suicide prevention. His goal was to run 60 miles that month.
“The rate of suicide and mental illness is alarmingly high, particularly to men” he wrote on a Movember.com. “Too many men are ‘toughing it out,’ keeping their feelings to themselves and struggling in silence. This November, I’m committing to growing my ‘mo’ and running 60 miles. That’s 60 miles for 60 men we lose each hour, every hour – the men who should still be here today.”
He said he wanted to reach a goal of $1,000. Onefootdown.com said that members of the Notre Dame community pledged $27,000 days after Plantz’s death.
A 33-year-old man was wounded Thursday morning after he became aggressive toward a South Shore Line employee and a physical struggle ensued with a transit police officer, Chicago
police said.
About 8:15 a.m., in the 13700 block of South Brainerd Avenue in the Hegewisch neighborhood, a man was on train No. 114 when he became aggressive with a ticket collector and conductor who requested assistance from a transit police officer. When the officer, a railroad police officer with the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, tried to remove the man, he became physically aggressive and a struggle ensued, and the officer discharged his weapon, Chicago police said.
A South Shore station is on the block where the shooting occurred.
The man suffered a gunshot wound to the abdomen and was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition, fire officials said.
The transit officer was taken to an area hospital for injuries to the face.
The investigation into the shooting has been turned over to the Chicago Police Department.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has two seats to fill on the influential appeals court in the nation’s capital that regularly feeds judges to the Supreme Court.
They are among the roughly 10% of federal judgeships that are or will soon be open, giving Biden his first chance to make his mark on the American judiciary.
Barring an improbable expansion of the Supreme Court, Biden won’t be able to do anything about the high court’s entrenched conservative majority any time soon. Justice Clarence Thomas, at 72, is the oldest of the court’s conservatives and the three appointees of former President Donald Trump, ranging in age from 49 to 56, are expected to be on the bench for decades.
Democrats traditionally have not made the judiciary a focus, but that is changing after four years of Trump and the vast changes he made. Biden’s appointments are also the only concrete moves he has right now to affect the judiciary at large, though there is talk about expanding the number of judges on lower courts.
The nearly 90 seats Biden can fill, which give their occupants life tenure after Senate confirmation, are fewer than former Trump inherited four years ago. That’s because Republicans who controlled the Senate in the final two years of the Obama White House confirmed relatively few judges.
Included in the tally are 10 seats on federal courts of appeals where nearly all appeals, other than the few dozen decided by the Supreme Court each year, come to an end.
One seat is held by Merrick Garland, whose confirmation as attorney general is expected in the coming days. Another longtime judge on the court, David Tatel, has said he is cutting back on his duties, a change that allows Biden to appoint his successor.
Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas were appellate judges at the courthouse at the bottom of Capitol Hill before they joined the high court. The late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg also served on the appeals court.
Following Scalia’s death in February 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Garland to the Supreme Court, but Senate Republicans didn’t give him even a hearing, much less a vote.
When Trump took office less than a year later, he had a high court vacancy to fill. Trump ended up making three Supreme Court appointments to go along with 54 appellate court picks and 174 trial judges, aided by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Democrats and their progressive allies say they’ve learned a lesson or two from the Republicans, and intend to make judicial nominations a greater focus than in past Democratic administrations.
“It’s an exceptional situation where you have a president and the people around him people who really see this as a high priority,” said former Sen. Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who served with Biden in the Senate for 16 years. Feingold is now president of the American Constitution Society.
So far, liberal groups are encouraged by the signals the White House is sending. White House counsel Dana Remus wrote senators in December that recommendations for new judges should come within 45 days
of a vacancy.
Biden already has pledged to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court if a seat opens up. Justice Stephen Breyer, 82, is the oldest member of the court and could retire, but he has not announced any plans.
Democrats are in search of several kinds of diversity, following the Trump years in which more than 75% of judicial nominees were men and 85% were white.
Liberal groups are also pushing for diversity of experience so that public defenders and public interest lawyers are considered along with big law firm lawyers and prosecutors who have predominated in recent administrations.
“Our view is we would like to see them prioritize experiential diversity, which would be new and different from the two previous Democratic administrations,” said Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice.
So far, the judges who have announced they are retiring or taking senior status, the term for a reduced workload, have mainly been appointees of Democratic presidents. Some appear to have put off retirement until Trump left the White House.
An additional four dozen or so are eligible to take senior status or will be before Biden’s term ends in 2025. Such judges must be at least 65 years old and with 15 years of service on the bench.
But Democrats also are eyeing a major expansion of the judiciary for the first time in 30 years. The creation of new judgeships to deal increased caseloads in parts of the country could draw bipartisan support, though it might provide a windfall of judicial appointments for Biden in the short term.
Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo recently wrote about the need for another federal judge for his state, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., backs the addition of judges in California and other states.
“There is broad agreement here on the dais on both sides,” Issa said last month during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on court expansion.