Illinois Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan announced last week that he was reviewing allegations of illegal campaign activity by state workers on taxpayer time, and was sharing information on this with the U.S. attorney.
His announcement followed the admission by House Minority Leader Lee Daniels that something smelled rotten in Denmark, or, in this case, his own office.
Daniels’ and Ryan’s concerns arose after a Crain’s Chicago Business report that the Elmhurst Republican’s entire Chicago staff spent much of the spring and summer of 2000 doing campaign work even though they were being paid to do state government work. Ryan, who’s also running as the GOP candidate for governor, is looking into whether the staffers also were compensated by the state for travel and other accrued expenses.
How shocking.
This is supposed to be illegal in Illinois. So illegal that Scott Fawell, Gov. George Ryan’s former chief of staff from his years as secretary of state, was indicted in April for, among other things, diverting state employees and resources to partisan campaign work.
The report followed a story published by Crain’s last month stating that Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood “provided” and “loaned” about a third of her government staff to work on election campaigns across the state in 2000.
Now, it is perfectly legal for state workers to do political duty on their own time. They can volunteer, just as anyone can, to help out. But they are not supposed to draw a government paycheck for partisan activities.
So Daniels and Wood have been tying themselves up into pretzels trying to explain how all of this work must have been done on “volunteer” time, cigarette breaks, bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, snack breaks, water cooler breaks, finger cracking breaks . . . you name it.
Newsflash: Daniels and Wood are not the only ones. And if Ryan is going to take an interest in this, he might as well start looking more broadly–at every state House and Senate staffer, and inside every state agency.
He’ll be shooting fish in a barrel.
This practice has been going on for as long as campaigns have been dirty, and everybody knows it. It has contributed to the consolidation of power in the leadership of the General Assembly. If you are a politically vulnerable legislator, you come to rely on the money and the troops provided by the leadership at campaign time. This becomes all the more egregious if the leaders’ troops are really being provided by the taxpayers.
This sudden come-to-Jesus move of course also begs the question: If Corinne Wood and Lee Daniels could “provide” or “loan” all these full-timers to campaigns for weeks on end, and still have smoothly functioning offices, why are they needed in the first place?
