There Are No Winners Here
Former House Speaker Michael Madigan leaves the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago Wednesday after being convicted of bribery and wire fraud charges. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)
NOTE: This story was originally posted for subscribers only. To receive subscriber-only newsletters and content, click here.
OPINION
Coming up in Republican politics, it’s pretty much just engrained in you that the evil oracle that was House Speaker Michael Madigan was absolutely corrupt.
He was the boogeyman of Illinois politics. Governing with an iron fist, kicking the tails of Republicans election after election, and generally controlling everyone and everything in Springfield for nearly all of his reign as Speaker.
Certainly, there were question marks going back decades. And everyone who knew who Mike McClain was knew he was Madigan’s backroom voice in Springfield.
But, when the verdict against Madigan came down this week, it was anything but fulfilling.
I don’t know Michael Madigan. I’ve never spoken to him. He wouldn’t know who I was if this newsletter wound up on his front door tomorrow.
Unlike a lot of folks in my former party, I don’t hate Michael Madigan. I certainly wasn’t rooting for any specific verdict or for his demise in his long-running trial. In fact, I flip-flopped about a thousand times during the trial as to whether the government’s case was too big, too complicated, too “in the weeds” for an almost anti-political jury to believing, at times, they had Madigan dead-to-rights on nearly every charge.
In many of these federal corruption trial, the defense cases are weak, at best. Not for Madigan’s team. He brought in some of the best attorneys in the city (who will surely be paid handsomely with the $6.2 million sitting in Madigan’s campaign fund) who argued an incredible defense. They called multiple witnesses to normalize the wheeling and dealing of the political world and took the incredible chance by putting Madigan himself on the stand.
The bottom line is the jury believed Madigan received bribes, if not directly, for his top lieutenants and friends. The jury also didn’t believe the G’s RICO case, which always seemed a little bit of a stretch from day one.
Michael Madigan is a convicted felon. It’s another stain on our state government.
What do we do about it?
I can almost guarantee you, as I write this early in the morning on February 14, 2025, Republican cries for ethics reform will be completely ignored by supermajority Democrats. They’ve already started to do the “we’ve never heard of this Madigan guy” game that they did with Rod Blagojevich after he was booted from office in 2009.
There must be real ethics reform. There must be meaningful campaign finance reform. There must be serious changes to the state’s woeful financial disclosure system. There are a dozen good starting points filed in Springfield right now.
House Ethics Committee Chairman Rep. Maurice West (D-Rockford) has told me multiple times that he has interest, ideas, and motivation to advance real ethics reform, but it always seems as if it never gets off the ground.
That should put all eyes on House Speaker Chris Welch, who we must remember slow walked a House investigation into Madigan in 2020 until the clock ran out in early 2021. The Speaker should take a stand in support of real ethics reform.
But unfortunately, I just don’t see the issue getting any traction. Democrats are not going to find consensus to potentially get themselves in ethical hot water. Democrats are not going to make it harder to raise money. And Democrats aren’t going to make it harder to get rich outside of their service in the General Assembly.
And the biggest problem here is that the public just doesn’t care. Voters have become so numb to corruption (and, that aforementioned belief that Madigan had to be dirty) that you won’t find some groundswell of support to fix the institution that most of the public doesn’t think about day in and day out. Voters just don’t care.
Until someone or something makes ethics reform an issue the public cares about, I’m not holding my breath for anyone actually working to clean up the system.
In that case, we all lose.
