Legislators face packed agenda in session’s final week
SPRINGFIELD — The Illinois General Assembly heads into the final scheduled week of its spring session facing unresolved issues from the budget to a proposal to help the Chicago Bears move to the suburbs, while also coming under pressure to toughen government ethics laws in the wake of the “ComEd Four” corruption case convictions.
Also on the table is the possibility of additional funding to help Chicago address its growing influx of migrants and asylum-seekers, and the need to finalize a district map for the city’s new elected school board.
Finalizing a state budget has been complicated by the need to fill a nearly $900 million hole in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s proposal due to ballooning costs of a statefunded health insurance program for adult immigrants in the country without legal permission.
Ethics reform has proved over the years to be an issue that can be just as knotty as the budget. But there’s an added impetus to act this year given the bombshell bribery trial that led to guilty verdicts against former House Speaker Michael Madigan’s close confidant Michael McClain and three others who were found to have attempted to bribe Madigan in an effort to advance Commonwealth Edison’s Springfield agenda.
While the Democraticcontrolled legislature has passed a series of ethics measures since 2019, at the dawn of a burgeoning statewide corruption scandal, critics say many of the efforts have been insufficient.
State Rep. Maurice West II, who heads the House Ethics and Elections Committee, said he’s “working hard to have a plan” for the final week of session but said any proposals that come about won’t be a knee-jerk reaction to the ComEd Four convictions.
“They won’t be something that we have to turn around and try to fix again because we operated in haste in 2023,” the Rockford Democrat said.
The steady stream of Democratic politicians who have been convicted or indicted in recent years has provided Republicans with plenty of talking points. State Rep. Ryan Spain, the deputy Republican leader and a member of the committee, said the panel met last week without even discussing ethics reform.
“Where are the leaders and what are they doing on the topic of ethics reform in the state of Illinois?” said Spain, of Peoria. “We have just over one week to go in session, and we are not doing anything on this key and critical topic.”
Madigan is scheduled to go to trial next year with McClain on separate racketeering charges alleging a slew of corrupt acts, including the scheme involving ComEd as well as a similar but smaller set of allegations involving AT&T’s Illinois affiliate.
Earlier steps to strengthen the state government ethics and lobbying laws began even before Madigan was indicted last year.
In fall 2019, following a federal raid on the offices of then-state Sen. Martin Sandoval and the arrest of then-state Rep. Luis Arroyo on a bribery charge, the General Assembly approved a measure that required more disclosure from lobbyists and ordered the Illinois secretary of state to create a combined online database for information on lobbyists, campaign contributions and public officials’ annual statements of economic interest.
The measure also created a task force to study additional changes, but its work foundered in early 2020 with the rise of the COVID19 pandemic.
It wasn’t until after Madigan was ousted from the speakership by his own members in January 2021 and resigned the House seat he’d occupied for a half-century that lawmakers revisited the issue.
The package lawmakers finalized in the fall of 2021 included a new revolving-door prohibition to prevent legislators from immediately becoming lobbyists after leaving office and more robust requirements for officials to disclose personal financial interests, among other changes.
The measure was widely panned by good-government groups as being riddled with loopholes and shortcomings. It even triggered the resignation of the General Assembly’s appointed watchdog, then-Legislative Inspector General Carol Pope, who said it weakened her office and “demonstrated true ethics reform is not a priority.”
The energy policy overhaul Pritzker signed in fall 2021 also contained provisions aimed at addressing ethical issues exposed by the ComEd scandal, including a requirement that state officials disclose whether they have immediate family members who work for utility companies.
All those efforts have been wanting, but not because lawmakers lack information about how to improve the state’s ethical climate after special commissions over the years have generated a host of recommendations, said Alisa Kaplan, executive director of Reform for Illinois.
“Lawmakers know what needs to be done,” Kaplan said. “It’s not like they need to reinvent the wheel here.”
One example would be strengthening the state’s new and “pathetically weak” revolving-door rule for ex-lawmakers, she said.
The provision, which took effect in January with the start of the new General Assembly, prohibits lawmakers from lobbying their former colleagues for six months after leaving office. But the cooling-off period ends with the adjournment of each two-year session of the legislature.
Government reform advocates argue that a prohibition on former lawmakers becoming lobbyists for at least two years after leaving office is the best way to prevent legislators from “auditioning” for their next gig while still in office, Kaplan said.
The relative weakness of Illinois’ law compared with those in other states was highlighted when former state Sen. Tom Cullerton registered as a lobbyist with Itasca-based Strategia Consulting on April 25. That was just 11 days after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for collecting more than $250,000 in salary and benefits from the Teamsters union despite doing little or no work.
The Villa Park Democrat resigned his Senate seat in February 2022, two weeks before pleading guilty to embezzlement.
While Kaplan’s group doesn’t take a position against lobbying by people who have served their time in prison, she said that Cullerton “shouldn’t be able to become a lobbyist yet.”
Cullerton did not respond to a request for comment.
Strategia CEO Lissa Druss, who was a spokeswoman for Cullerton following his August 2019 indictment, declined to comment on the revolving-door considerations involved in hiring the former lawmaker but defended the decision.
“He made a mistake, and he’s taken this opportunity to pay back his restitution,” Druss said.
Last week, former Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn was at the Illinois Capitol to deliver a letter to Pritzker, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and Senate President Don Harmon with recommendations on how to improve ethics laws in the state in the wake of the ComEd Four trial.
Quinn, who was lieutenant governor before being elevated to governor in 2009 following the impeachment and removal of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, first made his name in politics as a reform advocate.
In the letter, Quinn called for a special legislative session to review the state’s ethics laws. He also issued a laundry list of recommendations that included amending the Illinois Constitution to allow voters to enact stricter ethics laws through petitions and referendums.
During a news conference last week, Quinn said the ethics laws passed in 2021 were “praiseworthy” but “not sufficient.”
“We need our governor and our legislative leaders today to see that this verdict last week is frankly a clarion call from the everyday people of Illinois to the leaders of our state to do something and take action, and especially to empower voters to do the right thing when the situation demands it,” Quinn said.
The next day, Pritzker told reporters that he thinks some of Quinn’s ideas were “worthy of consideration” without getting into specifics. Pritzker then deferred the prospect of new ethics measures to the legislature.
“The General Assembly has, as you know, committees and hearings and has addressed ethics concerns over time. I don’t think that there’s anything that’s been specifically brought up by the recent doings in court that isn’t already illegal in law,” Pritzker said.
House Republicans echoed some of Quinn’s recommendations, including those on campaign finance reform, during their news conference last week, but expressed pessimism that the Democratic supermajority will address ethics reform in the closing days of the spring session.
“At the end of the day, you’re never going to put a law in place that’s going to stop criminal behavior,” said state Rep. Blaine Wilhour, a Republican from Beecher
City. “The idea is to put things in place to put some guardrails and safeguards in there to actually expose some of this stuff.”
In other business, legislation backing a Bears move to Arlington Heights might have gotten fresh momentum last week when revamped legislation was introduced by Rep. Marty Moylan, a Des Plaines Democrat. A committee hearing on the bill, which like a previous effort would include a $3 tax on tickets and a property tax assessment freeze for the 326-acre former Arlington International Racecourse site, is scheduled for Tuesday.
The General Assembly faces a July 1 deadline to draw boundaries for Chicago school board districts in preparation for a partially elected board in 2025 and a fully elected 21-member board in 2027.
House and Senate Democrats have held hearings to solicit input from the public on the CPS district map, and some expressed concerns that the proposed boundaries don’t reflect the demographics of the CPS student body.
As Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared a state of emergency last week in response to thousands of migrants who have settled in the city after crossing the southern U.S. border to seek asylum, the legislature could consider more funding to help the city provide services.
Pritzker’s staff has said his administration has so far spent $260 million on providing shelter and care for asylum-seekers and recently directed another $10 million to Chicago on top of $20 million lawmakers allocated in January in response to a request from Lightfoot.