Stealing Illinois

Jack Kemp

Illinois Pioneers Election Manipulation at the State Legislative Level

By Michael Bargo, Jr.

Chicago has long been nationally famous for manipulating election results. Its reputation for registering voters with a cemetery address, registering the homeless, and allowing people to vote more than once is legendary. What is not so well known is how Illinois has, along with other blue states, established new methods of stealing votes at the level of the state legislature. The plain fact is, when voters in Illinois elect state representatives and state senators, they vote for persons who are supposed to represent their interests. Republican voters want to see the Republican platform enacted into state legislation, and Democratic voters want to see Democrat ideas enacted into state legislation. That's the basis of the representative form of government.
But since January of 2017, the Illinois House of Representatives, led by Speaker Michael Madigan, has developed new techniques to steal the voice of voters and control what becomes a law and what doesn't. In other words, Illinois House speaker Madigan now bypasses election results completely through new methods of manipulating the writing and passing of bills in the Illinois House. In short, the House speaker of Illinois's state government has made the Illinois House a one-man operation.

This had been done through the establishment of rules that, remarkably, are allowed to stand. No one has challenged them in federal court as voting rights violations. The details of the "Madigan Rules," as they are called in Illinois, have been carefully described by the Illinois Policy Institute, the premier watchdog group in Illinois.

Given the Supreme Court's rulings on voting rights, and the representative form of government as established in the U.S. Constitution, that these rules are the actual rules that control representative state government in Illinois is astonishing.

Here's a brief discussion of the major House rules, as contained in House Resolution 46, passed in January 2017. To illustrate the importance of these rules, remember that when Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California, they were frustrated in that their policy ideas had to go through legislative committees, and these committees were under the control of those already in power.

Illinois House rules go one step farther and place the legislative control of the committees themselves in the hands of the House speaker through Rule 4. For example, the complete text of Rule 4(c)(13) clearly states that the speaker has the power "

o determine the number of majority [Democrat] caucus members and minority [Republican] caucus members to be appointed to all committees, except as otherwise provided by these Rules." The "otherwise provided" clause is meaningless; there are no other relevant rules. So the numbers of Democrats and Republicans on all committees are determined not by whether or not either party has a majority of elected members in the Illinois House of Representatives. This rule gives the speaker the power to override the results of elections and place the specific representatives the speaker wants into the committees that write all the House bills. This is clearly unconstitutional in that "the consent of the governed," as the Declaration of Independence outlines, is not the source of all governmental power in Illinois; rather, the will of only one person, the speaker, is.

Another rule expands on this. Not only does the speaker have the power in Illinois to decide what political party has the majority in every committee, but Rule 4(c)(14) gives the speaker sole power "o appoint all Chairpersons, Co-Chairpersons, and Vice-chairpersons of Committees (from either the majority or minority caucus), and to appoint all majority caucus members of committees" (parentheses original).

And to add another layer of control over legislation, another rule states that the speaker can replace anyone on any committee at any time.

Read it all at American Thinker!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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