Tag: Illinois

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insider corruption term limits

Seven Hundred Terms in a Row?

Ya gotta love Lou Lang. Any public servant who can manage to exude vast indifference to the public’s disgust with endless political corruption has something going for him. 

As a state representative in Illinois, he has had a front-​row seat to the constant corruption sordidly and melodramatically symbolized by former Governor Rod Blagojevich’s taped attempt to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat.

Like the disgraced governor, Lang favors brazen cynicism in the face of criticism.

After Blago got the boot, the new governor, Pat Quinn, set up an Illinois Reform Commission to study the corruption problem. The reform proposals ranged from the dubious to the … modest.

For example, the commission proposed term limits to combat political monopoly. But it proposed term limits not for all lawmakers, only for legislative leaders. And the cap? A rather generous 14 years. 

Illinois voters won’t get even that, let alone a better deal, until they have the right of citizen initiative and can impose term limits themselves.

Yet even a 14-​year maximum is way too stringent for the likes of Mr. Lang. After the commission issued its report, Lang rushed to assure the beleaguered populace of Illinois that if House members “want to elect Mike Madigan for 700 terms in a row, that’s our business.” Yeah! Get lost, citizens! Mind your own business!

Gotta love him.

Okay, maybe not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

Battle of the Corrupt States

The name. The hair. The gall. Illinois Governor Rod Blogojevich is getting lots of attention.

However, the governor’s favor-​trading is unique only in blatancy. The longer politicians hold power, the more readily they regard pay-​to-​play corruption as acceptable, profitable. Which is one reason I advocate initiative rights, term limits, mandatory caps on taxes and spending, and other reforms that pay-​to-​play politicos despise.

The desire to thwart such reform begets even more corruption.

Pundits say that if Illinois’s state government isn’t the most corrupt in the union, it’s in the running. But I nominate Oklahoma for the title. In Oklahoma, the bad-​old-​boy political establishment is so eager to thwart reform that politicians are willing to jail you for the “crime” of abetting democracy.

Two citizen activists and I found this out the hard way, when Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson indicted us in October 2007 for allegedly “defrauding” the state by running a petition drive to curb state spending.

The charges are phony, and Oklahoma’s residency law for signature gatherers — which we did not violate — has just been ruled unconstitutional.

Winning attorney Todd Graves said the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling “upholds an important free speech principle and joins other federal courts in upholding citizens’ First Amendment right to petition their government without threat of political prosecution.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.