Culture of corruption survives 'reform' in Illinois

NY Times:

If anything good was going to come out of the arrest and removal of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, it was supposed to be in the stack of legislation now awaiting the signature of the new governor.

A reform commission was appointed by the governor, Patrick J. Quinn, soon after Mr. Blagojevich’s impeachment from office in January. State lawmakers drew up their own Joint Committee on Government Reform. And citizen-led reform groups optimistically sprouted up across the state.

But now, with the legislative session over, some of the biggest backers of change say a historic opportunity has been lost, that too little is being cleaned up in a state that has become a national example of political corruption at its extreme.

“I don’t consider this reform legislation to accomplish in any way, shape or form what it was supposed to,” said Anton R. Valukas, a former United States attorney in Chicago and a member of one of the new groups, Change Illinois, who pointed in particular to efforts to set rules on campaign finance. “The thing is, I really had believed that this was the time to do something.”

Even the commission assigned by Mr. Quinn to recommend how best to fix Illinois’s broken political system says the state has fallen short on crucial matters.

State leaders, for example, delayed until later in the year a proposal to make the system of redrawing political districts less political; failed to decide on a proposal to let voters to recall political leaders; put off to further study the notion of financing campaigns with public money; and pushed aside a series of politically sensitive proposals to bolster legal tools for the authorities to investigate political corruption, set term limits for state lawmakers in leadership positions, and shorten the campaign season by moving primary election dates closer to general election.

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Springfield, Illinois was an attractive city when I visited it several years ago, but what happens there is not very pretty sometimes. In contrast Chicago can be unattractive in places and in its politics a lot of the time and it is the "Chicago way" that haunts what happens in Springfield.

Unfortunately, we are seeing aspects of the "Chicago way" in Washington now. Obama's firing of the AmericCorps Inspector General for doing his job is one aspect of that.

What the state needs is leadership that can derail the "Chicago way," and bring some integrity to the functioning of government across the state. But from this perspective it looks like Chicago politicians are still controlling the process.