THE ILLINOIZE: Monday Free for All
March 28, 2022
Good morning and happy Monday.
Sunny with a high of 47 for those of you traveling to Springfield today. 70 and rainy Wednesday, potential snow Thursday. Illinois in the spring. The House is IN at 2, the Senate is IN at 5:30. The Governor has nothing on his public schedule.
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Let’s get to it.
YOUR MONDAY FREE FOR ALL
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Michael Madigan’s indictment: How he pushed for allies to get ComEd jobs and his own daughter’s legislation was killed. (Chicago Tribune)
Nearly four years ago, legislation that aimed to help low-income electricity customers was making its way to the floor of an Illinois House chamber tightly controlled by its longtime speaker, Michael Madigan.
The bill’s main advocate: Madigan’s daughter, then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan. One of its primary opponents: Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest electric utility.
By the time the Illinois General Assembly’s spring session was over, ComEd won — because, according to federal prosecutors, Michael Madigan paved the way.
In what may be one of the most intriguing chapters of the federal indictment filed earlier this month against ex-Speaker Madigan, prosecutors alleged he greenlighted efforts to kill his own daughter’s legislation as he pressed ComEd to give jobs to two political allies, including a coveted position on the utility’s board of directors.
Killing his daughter’s bill isn’t a crime, but if he arranged anything in return for it, then we’ve got a bribe. But if ComEd didn’t pad Madigan’s pockets directly, how can you prove the quid pro quo if you don’t have a smoking gun? I continue to be very interested at how this trial will shake out.
Related: Analysis: What to expect in the Madigan trial – whenever it begins (Capitol News Illinois)
What’s next for the Illinois parole board? (Capitol News Illinois)
In a rare move [last] week, the state Senate rejected a gubernatorial appointee to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board that passed through its Executive Appointment Committee with a recommendation.
The Senate vote may be the beginning salvo in the battle of the remaining Prisoner Review Board appointments and other criminal justice reform measures. For Pritzker’s PRB appointees awaiting Senate confirmation, the clock is ticking.
For Jeff Mears, it’s over.
Before the vote, Mears passed through the Executive Appointment Committee on Tuesday and received a recommendation. Later that day, the Senate Democrats split, with 22 voting yes and 18 Democrats not voting. Sen. Patrick Joyce, D-Essex, joined the 18 GOP members and voted no. Mears fell eight votes short of being approved and lost his spot.
“It’s surprising that anybody would vote him down, that people wouldn’t show up to vote,” Pritzker said Wednesday at a press event. “What Republicans are trying to do is to essentially break down a function of government. They want to do away with it just like during the Rauner years. So much was done to break down the functions of government, the agencies of government. This is not right.”
Pritzker said it bothers him that the Democrats didn’t vote to approve Mears.
“It bothers me that they are listening to the Republican rhetoric. They are telling false stories. It’s Facebook fakery about these folks who are nominated. These are people who have served and served well and they deserve to be approved,” he said.
Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director for the prison watchdog group The John Howard Association, said that while crimes against children and murders of police officers are horrific, they are not necessarily indicative of the person’s future behavior and the threat those who commit these crimes pose to the public decades later.
“This is deeply problematic. The Prisoner Review Board needs to be filled and functional,” Vollen-Katz said.
Related: Democrats Reject a Pritzker Parole Board Nominee, Other Confirmations in Doubt (The Illinoize)
If the remaining nominees don’t get a vote Monday, they’re automatically confirmed. That sounds like the exact kind of cop out you would expect politicians (no matter the party) to make.
College Illinois won't go broke after all (Crain’s Chicago Business)
It was supposed to be a way to help save for future college costs at no cost to the state.
In the end, College Illinois—the program the state established in the late 1990s to allow parents or others to purchase contracts for children to eventually attend state colleges and universities at a locked-in cost—cost taxpayers more than $200 million.
Lawmakers appropriated $250 million to shore up the bankrupt program in the $4.1 billion package signed into law today by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Most of the funding in the bill was aimed at paying off a chunk of the billions in expanded unemployment benefits provided during the pandemic. The bill, passed on party-line votes in an election year, was championed by Democrats as a hefty down payment on getting Illinois’ fiscal house in order. Republicans chided Democrats for preserving much of the billions in federal pandemic aid for new spending rather than paying off what’s already owed.
College Illinois has been closed to new participants for five years. But tens of thousands of contracts still must be honored as they come due, and the investment fund that was designed to cover all of those costs was hundreds of millions short.
Besides incumbent Treasurer Mike Frerichs, former Treasurer and Secretary of State candidate Alexi Giannoulias both have College Illinois on their ledger. Giannoulias saw a loss of around $150 million while he oversaw the Bright Start 529 program. These issues won’t go away in the fall.
No overall ban on pols using campaign funds to pay criminal defense lawyers, state’s top court rules (Capitol News Illinois)
The Illinois Supreme Court ruled Thursday that elected public officials and their campaign committees may, in limited circumstances, use campaign funds to pay criminal defense attorney fees.
The case involved a former Chicago city alderman, Danny Solis, who reportedly avoided federal prosecution by agreeing to cooperate with the FBI and Department of Justice in their investigation of another alderman, Ed Burke, who was indicted in 2019 on federal corruption charges.
Ed Burke is married to Chief Justice Anne Burke, who recused herself from the case. Two other justices, Mary Jane Theis and P. Scott Neville Jr., also did not take part in the decision, leaving only four justices to decide the case – the minimum number needed to issue a majority opinion.
Solis served on the Chicago City Council from 1996 to 2019 representing the city’s 25th Ward and for a time chaired the council’s powerful Zoning Committee. He did not run for reelection in 2019 and was succeeded in office by current Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez.
When he first began cooperating with investigators, he retained the law firm of Foley & Lardner LLP. On May 21, 2019, the day after Sigcho-Lopez was sworn into office, the 25th Ward Democratic Organization – the committee that had backed his campaigns – paid the firm $220,000 for legal fees.
Unless a campaign fund needs to defend itself, as an organization, against a criminal allegation, it should not be legal. Bottom line. I’ve had campaigns that I’ve been working on to check with attorneys on things that are/aren’t legal, and that should be fine. But criminal activity by an outside person is a totally different ballgame.
Related: Opinion: Lawmakers unlikely to take Supreme Court’s invitation to act (Shaw Local)
Ex-suburban highway commissioner admits taking $281,000 in kickbacks — except for in an election year (Chicago Sun-Times)
When the government was buying vaccines, Rep. Newman was trading (Crain’s Chicago Business)
Locked into a tough primary race for re-election, U.S. Rep. Marie Newman has signed on to legislation that would ban the increasingly controversial practice of members of Congress trading stock in individual companies.
But Newman’s conversion to that issue is recent—very recent. Only in the last month have Newman and her husband voluntarily ceased the practice themselves, this after trading stock worth $5.8 million in 2021. That was enough to rank her ninth among the 535 members of the House and Senate, right behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is eighth.
Newman’s campaign says her husband has been “unwinding” the family’s stock accounts for a while now and has reached the point in which the couple neither will add or delete holdings.
“Rep. Newman decided to stop her family’s trading to align herself with the proposed legislation that she has signed onto, which is a legislative priority for her office,” her campaign said in a statement. “Congresswoman Newman's family has stopped all trading of individual stocks to align with this legislative priority and their final trade occurred in February.”
For a darling of the progressive left, this is not going to help her in a primary.
CPS has lost 8% of schools’ ‘tech assets’ during COVID, tens of thousands of computers, even air purifiers, defibrillators (Chicago Sun-Times)
Computers and other devices that amount to at least 8% of the Chicago Public Schools’ “technology assets” have been listed as “lost” during the coronavirus pandemic.
Among the missing items: tens of thousands of computers, iPads and other high-tech devices. They were lent to students during remote learning but weren’t returned.
The police suspect that much of the other property CPS listed as missing actually was stolen by people with access to school buildings during the pandemic.
It isn’t just computers. Air purifiers, defibrillators, a treadmill, lawn equipment and other property also vanished from schools since the beginning of the pandemic.
The Sun-Times reviewed police reports listing lost items for 15 public schools in Chicago. The cost of the missing items in those schools was estimated at more than $920,000.
And that doesn’t include hundreds of computers whose values weren’t even tallied in the reports.
Related: Chicago Public Schools is flush with federal COVID-19 relief cash but is spending little of it (WBEZ)
Maybe with a track record like that, they shouldn’t be spending much more of it.
Lawmakers take aim at Blue Cross Blue Shield in wake of Springfield Clinic controversy (State Journal-Register)
After being fined $339,000 by the state's Department of Insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield has caught the attention of lawmakers at the Capitol. The insurer has been at the center of a controversy after it terminated a contract with Springfield Clinic, leaving tens of thousands of customers in limbo as they search for new doctors or navigate the process to keep their doctors.
To address this, Rep. Sue Scherer, D-Decatur, on Wednesday introduced legislation, HB 5729, that would introduce new enforcement powers to the Department of Insurance and institute new requirements about the ratio of doctors to patients for an insurance company's network.
Blue Cross Blue Shield has been under intense scrutiny after terminating its contract with Springfield Clinic last summer and fall. This has resulted in 55,000 customers in the region being forced to either switch their doctors or request a special exemption, according to Harmony Harrington, Blue Cross Blue Shield's vice president of government affairs.
"We believe we meet adequacy even without Springfield Clinic," said Harrington on Tuesday.
The state's first-of-its kind fine issued to Blue Cross Blue Shield was because the Department of Insurance believes that cutting out Springfield Clinic resulted in a "material change" to the network, meaning that the kinds of care provided are different following the change.
Beyond Scherer's legislation, lawmakers also plan to hold a hearing on the conflict between Blue Cross Blue Shield and Springfield Clinic.
Blue Cross looks terrible here, and I’m not sure they know it. But, the question that always seems to come up in these situations with all insurance companies remains: do they even care?
SOME TOP LINKS FROM LAST WEEK
Irvin Praised Part of Criminal Justice Bill, Now Rails Against It
Opinion: The Brewing Messaging Battle Over Unemployment Debt
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