Sooner or later it’s going to dawn on Jim Heiple and his pals that they didn’t do him any favors by stacking the deck at the Illinois Courts Commission.
Thanks to their maneuvering, an odd matter of clout-mongering has blown up into a case that raises the real possibility that the Illinois legislature will impeach the chief judge of the Supreme Court.
Heiple has richly earned the grief, if not the ultimate punishment. He tried to use his standing as a judge to beat the rap on some speeding tickets, and he browbeat some of the cops who were dealing with him. When the group that investigates judges starting sniffing around, he stuck one of his best buddies, Justice Moses Harrison, at the head of the commission that would decide any punishment. Then Harrison and Heiple thumbed their noses at the police and the public by staging a sham hearing where the cops weren’t allowed to speak.
The problem is that this should just be a matter of slapping Heiple around a bit to shake out his hubris, not a showdown in the Illinois legislature.
But that’s where it’s heading. The legislature is considering how to move on calls to impeach a judge for the first time this century.
The judge should make no mistake: he may have friends in the courts willing to front for him, but he doesn’t in the legislature. Judges and legislators are getting a lot of calls from constituents demanding that Heiple be impeached. One Supreme Court justice has received 700 letters. The Heiple affair is making legislators nervous.
The only thing saving Heiple right now is that the legislative leaders believe impeachment would not be the responsible thing to do. But anyone whose fate rests on the legislature doing the responsible thing is about as safe as the manager of a baseball team that threatens to go 0-162.
The people who have no stomach for impeachment are right, though. In Heiple’s case, impeachment amounts to rolling up the state constitution to swat a fly.
Why is the public so mad? In large part, because Heiple wrote the inane Baby Richard decision, taking the little boy from his adoptive parents and turning him over to his biological father who later left home. That has a lot to do with the lynching mood.
But in that case, Heiple had accomplices.
All of the Supreme Court justices agreed with Heiple in the Baby Richard decision. When the case came back to the court, only two of the justices changed their minds and favored the adoptive parents. Heiple just got out his poison pen to write the ruling.
Then there’s Baby Jane, an infamous custody case in central Illinois. A baby girl was given up by her birth mother to a family that has raised her for 3 1/2 years. The allegedly ne’er-do-well father has come along and demanded the child. Last fall, the Illinois Appellate Court used the Baby Richard decision as grounds for a key ruling that went against the adoptive family, and last week the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of that decision.
Baby Jane’s most prominent champion in the legislature is Rep. Gwenn Klingler, who last week sponsored the move to impeach Heiple. Klingler insists that there is no connection. Who knows, maybe there isn’t. But when legislators even appear to be seeking revenge for court rulings by knocking off the judges, it looks bad.
Say Baby Richard and Baby Jane had nothing to do with it. Say that Heiple deserves to be impeached because he tried to fix his own case before the commission.
He did, and it was a clumsy fix. Heiple knew he was in hot water when he picked his Harrison to run the commission, passing over Justice Charles Freeman, who by tradition was next in line. And Harrison’s decision to prevent testimony at the disciplinary hearing from several police officers–after they had taken a day off from serving and protecting to travel to the hearing–may have done more than anything to get Heiple tossed out of office.
But how about the unindicted co-conspirators?
The rest of the Supreme Court appointed Heiple as chief justice, knowing he was a bully. They even moved up the vote by several weeks to avoid any public or media campaign to choose someone else.
When Heiple announced he’d picked Harrison to head the courts commission, the rest of the Supreme Court could have overruled him. Nobody raised a squawk, not even Freeman.
Justice Michael Bilandic turned in his most insipid public performance since the blizzard of 1979. Twice, judges on the court have tried to get the court members together. Not to sanction Heiple, just to talk about the whole affair. Bilandic was the deciding vote, and he acted just like a backbench alderman–he took a walk.
So, between the crude manipulating by Heiple and Harrison and the hollow timidness of others on the Supreme Court, you have–I don’t want to call it a constitutional crisis, let’s just call it one fat mess.
I don’t believe either House Speaker Michael Madigan or Senate President James “Pate” Philip think that Heiple deserves impeachment. Public flogging, maybe, but not impeachment.
For that matter, the legislature has never sized anybody up for impeachment under the 1970 constitution, so the leaders have been scrambling this week to figure out just how the heck they do it. An agreement on the general direction is likely to be announced Friday.
The leaders have no taste for blood. But after the sham hearing before the courts commission, they will do nothing that might look like they’re trying to stall an impeachment resolution. They also sure don’t want their members taking any risks to save one arrogant and impetuous Supreme Court justice who has a penchant for using legal opinions to take potshots at politicians.
So if the rest of the Supreme Court wants to avoid having to hang the vacancy sign outside Heiple’s chambers, they’re going to have to stop pretending they don’t have a problem. They made him the chief justice, and they can unmake him the chief justice. Busting him in rank would probably be enough to take the legislature off the hook.
What would it take to shake up Bilandic and the others? Maybe a campaign to impeach Heiple and appoint Jane Byrne as his replacement.
