Tracy on Inspector General Opening: "We've been at an impasse"
Sen. Jil Tracy (R-Quincy), the chair of the Legislative Ethics Commission, says partisan politics is playing too much of a role in the effort to fill the Legislative Inspector General job, recently vacated by retired Judge Carol Pope.
Call it the fox guarding the hen house or the inmates running the asylum, but legislators are deadlocked on who they want to hire to investigate the General Assembly on ethics complaints.
Former appellate judge Carol Pope recently resigned as LIG after criticizing a legislative ethics bill that she said “watered down” her office making it harder to begin investigations into lawmakers.
Sen. Jil Tracy (R-Quincy) is criticizing Democrats on the bicameral, bipartisan Legislative Ethics Commission for pushing a candidate for LIG that wasn’t recommended by a search committee. She says Republicans are pushing to follow the recommendation of the independent search committee.
“The Republicans, basically, want to respect the process of the search committee,” Tracy said. “We want to respect that a citizen’s advisory group told us who they think the most qualified candidate is because, overwhelmingly, they favor the candidate that the Republicans [support.]”
Tracy says Democrats want a current inspector in the LIG office under Pope to get the job, but that person wasn’t recommended by the search committee.
Rep. Kelly Burke (D-Evergreen Park), who Chairs of the House Ethics Committee a sits on the Legislative Ethics Commission, declined an interview request from The Illinoize. But, she said in a statement that Republicans have politicized the process by allowing candidate names to be released.
“The Legislative Ethics [Commission’s] work, including the deliberations on the selection of the Legislative Inspector General, are intended to be bipartisan and confidential,” Burke said. “It is unfortunate that my Republican colleagues have failed to honor that tradition and have instead blocked good faith efforts to come to consensus on which qualified candidates to present to the General Assembly for final selection. Worse, they went public with the candidates' names and deliberately presented the career highlights of only their preferred candidate. In truth, both candidates have excellent experience and credentials. Both are former federal prosecutors and both have worked in the executive branch. They each have additional legal and government experience, but the Democratic members' preferred candidate has more germane experience as an inspector general and an investigator. We feel this experience has prepared him for the duties and demands of the LIG job. Both of these candidates have long careers in public service and deserve better treatment than they've received from the Republican members of the LEC.”
Tracy says the potential candidate’s names were leaked to a liberal political blog by one of the legislative leaders minutes after she sent a letter to legislative leaders informing them of the impasse.
