To jaded followers of Illinois politics it sounds more like business as usual than the subject of a criminal investigation: A politically vulnerable state representative quits his office to make room for a stronger candidate in the upcoming election, whereupon the ex-legislator is handed a thank-you present–a state legal services contract for work he never performs.
Slowly, the threshold of public outrage seems to be ratcheting down on such behavior. And after a Downstate newspaper began asking questions about the deal, the Illinois State Police launched a probe.
Now it is House Speaker Michael Madigan’s turn to sweat. He’s the one who gave the hook to former state Rep. Glenn Bradford (the vulnerable one) and who saw to it that Bradford, for his troubles, got a $20,000 contract to provide legal services to the speaker’s office. It might have been a routine, if unpretty, political deal, except Bradford collected ten payments worth $9,697 without performing any work. When the whistle blew, he returned the money. Just an administrative snafu, the Democrats say.
Predictably, Republicans are professing outrage at this deal engineered by the Democratic speaker, and Democrats are crying that it’s all politics.
There must be a lot of pent-up outrage in Republican circles, since none of it squeezed out during the MSI scandal in which the administration of GOP Gov. Jim Edgar ladled $13 million in padded bills to a politically connected firm. That same scandal touched the GOP’s legislative inner sanctum. Or were those MSI steak-and-lobster packages delivered by mistake?
Democrats, for their part, ought to put a lid on it and let the state police do their job. Before Democrats cry that the investigation is a political charade by a GOP-controlled enforcement agency, they might recall that it was a state trooper’s spade work that led to the federal probe, indictment and conviction of state and MSI officials for bilking the welfare department.
State legislators from both parties would do well to note a changing public attitude–and prosecutorial response–toward ghost payrolling and other forms of payoff politics. Those are hard-earned taxpayer dollars being siphoned off, whether counted by the thousands or the millions.
