“As the Illinois General Assembly struggles to overcome federal census data challenges in pursuit of remapping legislative districts, speculation persists that lawmakers will attempt to craft new boundaries for the state’s fifty-year-old judicial districts,” says the “2021 Illinois Judicial Redistricting Whitepaper” recently issued by the Illinois Civil Justice League (ICJL).
The group emphasizes that “the issue of a judicial remap holds the potential to drastically remake the Illinois Supreme Court – perhaps, more so, than even the unprecedented 2020 retention election that spelled the end of Third District Supreme Court Justice Tom Kilbride’s twenty-year tenure.”
What is it with Kilbride and redistricting?
When Kilbride first ran for a seat on the high court in 2000, Mike Madigan and the state Democrat Party contributed nearly $700,000 to his campaign. When he ran for retention in 2010, Mike and minions ponied up almost twice that much.
Six years later, Kilbride and three bench mates blocked a ballot initiative that would have authorized a citizen commission to redraw legislative district maps, a serious threat to Madigan’s longstanding domination of a reliably languid deliberative body.
Robert Thomas, one of the dissenting justices in the 2016 ballot initiative decision, noted at the time “a palpable sense of frustration by voters of every political affiliation that self-perpetuating institutions of government have excluded them from meaningful participation in the political process.”
Thomas emphasized that our state constitution is “meant to prevent tyranny, not to enshrine it.”
Ironic, isn’t it, that the departure of these two rivals from the bench should precipitate the current machinations over judicial redistricting?
“Republicans have never held a majority under the current 1970 Constitution,” the ICJL whitepaper notes.
Suffice it to say that Democrats have no intention of ceding that advantage, but it may be too late to avoid what increasingly seems inevitable.
A Republican-majority high court may not benefit Democrat politicians, but it will benefit constituents who have suffered from the arrogance, indifference, and self-serving policies of elected officials for far too long.