Steve's Blog

On May 1^st, House Democrats filed House Floor Amendment 2 to Senate Bill 2412 (nominally titled “DCFS-CHILD WELFARE GOALS”).  Let’s set aside for now the cruel irony of using a bill meant ostensibly to explore what can be done to lessen the abuse and neglect of children so as to allow the super-duper majority party the opportunity to further abuse and neglect the voters of Illinois.

The intent of the amendment was to block political parties from slating candidates for the General Assembly to run for office after the March primary election if they hadn’t run in the primary, which, when you think about it, makes absolutely no sense. Under the rules that existed before the passage of this bill, parties that had no official nominees for a particular elected office after the primary election were given 75 days afterwards to “slate” candidates to run as the official party nominee in those races. This year, that deadline was to be June 3.

In a matter of 48 hours, Democrats rammed SB2412 through both the House and Senate and rushed it to the Governor’s desk, where he signed it, thus ending the candidate nominating process while it was already underway. All of this happened six weeks after the March 19 primary, and about four weeks before the June 3 deadline. And you probably thought this kind of thing only happens in Venezuela.

It’s not that the bill only applies to future elections, it prohibited slating of candidates for this year’s election, meaning they changed the rules in the middle of the game. So why are they doing this? They did it to avoid challenges and to give voters fewer options. Without the slating process, all candidates for the House and Senate would have to make their intentions to run for office clear a year before the General Election. This is a free pass for incumbents, because if no one runs in the primary, they’re free to vote in Springfield however they want without being held accountable.

While the changes in the law applied to both political parties, it fell more heavily on Republicans since the GOP intended to rely on the traditional slating process to place candidates on the ballot to run against a number of Democratic incumbents.

Governor Pritzker described the law as an “ethics reform” measure (!) and said the law was needed to ensure that only primary voters could choose party nominees for seats in the Illinois House and Senate.

Given what happened last week in Chicago, it was serendipitous that whoever wrote the amendment limited it to state legislative races, because if it had applied to all races, what would have happened at the top of the ticket in November if the law was allowed to go into effect? The Democratic nominee, having never run in or won a presidential primary election in any state, let alone Illinois, would have found herself perched on the horns of a legal dilemma of her own party’s making. But of course that possibility never occurred to the Governor, the Speaker or any other Illinois delegate who voted for SB2412 and voted for the ultimate nominee at the convention because they live safely within the echo chamber of their own heads with no thought of contradiction.

But sometimes events have a way of highlighting hypocrisy in strange and illuminating ways. Republicans contended the law amounted to outright election interference by the majority party. If allowed to stand, the law would ensure that over 50 Democratic incumbents in the House and Senate would face no competition this fall. The law was challenged in court by 14 Republican legislative candidates seeking to use the slating process to have their names placed on the November ballot.

In a ruling that applied to the 14 Republican candidates from northern Illinois who joined the lawsuit, Sangamon County Circuit Judge Gail Noll ruled the law violated the constitutional rights of voters and candidates.

Speaker Welch appealed the ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court, arguing that judges have no authority to question the ability of state lawmakers to change ballot access rules, even in the middle of an election cycle. Welch and his attorneys further argued that the law was needed to make sure that only primary voters are allowed to nominate candidates for office, and not party bosses or political insiders (cf: Kamala Harris).

On August 23^rd, the Illinois Supreme Court issued an order indicating that it was deadlocked on the question of whether SB2412 had trampled the rights of Republican candidates and voters and expanded its ruling to include all legislative races, not just the 14 who joined in the original complaint. The decision was procedural and didn’t rest on the substance of the law, which meant that the net effect of the ruling was to void its effect for this year’s election while presumably letting it stay in effect in future elections.

The Court noted that two of its members, Justices Neville and Cunningham, had recused themselves in the matter, ruling that the effect of the recusals resulted in a situation in which the remaining five justices (three Democrats and two Republicans) could not agree on a decision that would produce the four-member majority needed to deliver an opinion. Therefore, the ruling of the lower court was allowed to stand. The court did not indicate why Neville and Cunningham had opted not to participate in the case (and the law doesn’t require them to do so), but I like to think that they decided that their self-respect outweighed the impulse to act as partisan hacks (they’re both Democrats), thus ducking the question altogether. On the other hand, the members of the Court may have all decided that the best way to keep from having to step on the burning shoebox full of dog squeeze that the Legislature had dropped on its doorstep was to create a procedural deadlock and drew straws to see who’d sit this one out.

However long the odds may be, more than a dozen candidates who bravely entered the arena will now give voters in November a choice they would have otherwise not had. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.