The Tribune yesterday ran the first in a series of pieces over the coming weeks exploring the corrosive culture prevalent in governing the Land of Lincoln for over 100 years.
Our takeaway? Illinois and Chicago’s reputations as cesspools of government corruption are well earned.
Chicagoans and Illinoisans tend to consume these stories indictment by indictment, conviction after conviction, sentencing after sentencing. It all can start to feel like background noise — as if journalists were covering yet another sorry baseball season on the North Side, South Side or (as this year) both sides at once.
So we think there’s great value in stepping back and surveying the history and scope of the habitual manipulation of powerful (and not so powerful) government offices for private gain. The Tribune did that yesterday, tracing the state’s sorry history and presenting a rogue’s gallery of those caught with their hands in the cookie jar and punished, as well as some who we now know to be scoundrels but who never were prosecuted or convicted.
When the grifters and the system that enables them all are compiled in one place, the effect is sobering.
For decades, many Chicagoans and Illinoisans would take some measure of perverse pride in the roguish ways of the political class. “Early and often” is the joke still repeated about illegal voting.
Then there’s “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” We saw that particular trope come to life on the witness stand and in secretly recorded phone conversations during last year’s so-called ComEd Four trial, focused on one clouted company’s scheme to win the support of then-House Speaker Michael Madigan for an outrageously lucrative run of state laws in the 2010s. To win those goodies, Commonwealth Edison essentially performed the role government used to play during the salad days of the Chicago Machine, giving political workers and Madigan loyalists generous compensation for little or no work.
When government agencies served that purpose — before pesky court rulings made doing so more difficult — we used to call the beneficiaries payrollers. In the latter part of Madigan’s mind-boggling 36 years running the state’s lower chamber, payrollers reinvented themselves as lobbyists and consultants. Madigan is set to stand trial in October on conspiracy charges and has pleaded not guilty. The four convicted in the ComEd trial, including former utility CEO Anne Pramaggiore, have moved for new trials in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling a few months ago that undermined much of federal prosecutors’ case against them.
The corruption conviction of former Ald. Ed Burke, for decades the dean of the City Council and a local pol who threw his weight around like few others before or since, was yet another dramatic marker.
Many of the ways the Burkes and Madigans of our state have managed to feather their nests — and those of their loyal troops — are centered on the gaping loopholes in ethics laws that were written to reassure the public their representatives aren’t on the take. Both Burke and Madigan had law practices focused on property tax appeals, an obvious and easy way to squeeze monied interests needing things from the city or state. Such officials shouldn’t be allowed in that business as long as they’re in office, but there’s no law against that. As of yet.
During the ComEd Four trial, the practice of lawmakers leaving office and then almost immediately becoming contract lobbyists was exposed as a convenient way for Madigan to steer private-sector cash to those who’d kept him in power for so long. Companies needing Madigan’s support for pet legislation, or to kill bills they deemed harmful, knew to play along and hire those Madigan favorites as lobbyists.
That abhorrent practice, too, persists; a recent state law aimed at “reform” forces former lawmakers to wait a scant six months before lobbying their former colleagues.
During the ComEd Four trial, former state Rep. Scott Drury testified about a bill he sponsored soon after joining the General Assembly that would have imposed a far longer waiting period. He recalled meeting with Madigan, seeking to gain the speaker’s support. Madigan naturally had no interest, but calmly explained to Drury that not every state lawmaker was a lawyer like Drury and could make good money after leaving public life.
The unstated but clear message? Those without such advantages would need to be able to trade on their relationships with their colleagues, and Madigan most of all.
Post the disgrace of Madigan and Burke, we believe most Chicagoans now are well past the stage of chuckling wryly and rolling their eyes at such blatant corruption. They used to call Chicago “the city that works,” an accolade with a double meaning. On the surface, of course, it was a celebration of Chicago’s working-class roots. But it also referred to the way in which state and municipal government provided services while also enriching many on the public payroll well beyond the respectable salaries they earned.
Paddy Bauler (“This city ain’t ready for reform”), the Richard J. Daley Machine and Madigan and Burke caught on a phone tap yakking about “landing the tuna” always will be an integral and even colorful part of this rough and ready city’s history. But our wish — and we believe this to be true of most other Chicagoans as well — is that the book be closed now.
We’re not naive enough to think there will be no more chapters. But, with Barack Obama on our minds in the aftermath of last week’s Democratic National Convention, we’re audacious enough to hope that tomorrow’s (occasional) villains will be one-off rogues and not routine products of a system rotten to its core.
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