(The Center Square) – An analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Justice found on average more than one Illinois public servant was convicted every week between 1983 and 2023.
As longtime former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, charged with 23 counts of corruption-related charges, waits for a federal jury to decide his fate, a policy advocacy group is calling for reforms in Springfield.
The House speaker decides which bills live or die through the Rules Committee. The speaker also appoints leadership positions and the stipends that accompany them.
Joe Tabor is the director of Legal Research at the Illinois Policy Institute.
“If he doesn’t want a bill passed, then it’s not going to get passed, even if it’s popular, even if it has overwhelming support in the legislature, he can make sure that it doesn’t see any movement,” said Tabor. “So that lends itself to, I think, what you saw in the trial, where interests that want to get their legislation passed, they have one person to go to and that is the Speaker.”
Alisa Kaplan, Reform for Illinois executive director, explained that the Legislative Inspector General’s (LIG) office does not have the authority to issue subpoenas or publish summary reports without the approval of the lawmakers who make up the Legislative Ethics Commission.
“Right now, the situation is you basically have the fox watching the hen house … with legislators expected to oversee their fellow legislators, their friends, their colleagues, people they’ll need favors from in the future. It’s just structurally, the incentives are not there for particularly robust oversight,” said Kaplan. “There’s various ways that you could get more independence into the process for investigating and enforcing ethics complaints right now. We’ve testified about this back in 2018. We testified about this back in 2020 and 2021.The legislature did allow the LIG to open investigations on their own, but then they also restricted their jurisdiction in other ways. In terms of who ultimately holds the strings when it comes to enforcing the rules, the legislators are still in charge.”
Kaplan said whether Madigan is convicted or not, Illinois should move forward when it comes to addressing corruption and when it comes to ethics reform.
Tabor points out the House speaker is allowed to call a bill for a vote without giving lawmakers any advance notice.
“There’s thousands of bills that are introduced every year in the General Assembly. So you don’t have a chance to read them all,” said Tabor. “Lawmakers should be able to have lead-up time to know what they’re voting on, to be able to read the bills and to then discuss them and debate them.”
Tabor explained that the rules governing recusals when a lawmaker faces a conflict of interest still rely on the honor system.
“Lawmakers can recuse themselves, but they’re not required to disclose why they’re recusing themselves,” said Tabor. “[In current statute] the idea is that they should recuse themselves from voting, but there’s nothing that requires it.”
Kaplan said there wasn’t much appetite for really meaningful reform back when Madigan was indicted in 2019. She suspects corruption and ethics reforms could be an issue in the 2026 gubernatorial race.
