Former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan is a man who needed blind loyalists to hold his power in Springfield over the last 40 years. Tim Mapes played that role well. Mapes was Madigan’s longtime chief of staff and held other titles as he worked alongside Madigan to control the Illinois House of Representatives and Democratic Party of Illinois.
In being found guilty of federal corruption charges in late August, Mapes joined senior two executives of ComEd and Springfield insiders Mike McClain and Jay Doherty — the “ComEd 4.” They are likely headed to prison because they helped Madigan run a corrupt political and governmental enterprise. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago has alleged it’s a criminal racketeering organization. Madigan goes on trial in April for allegedly using his power to steer business to his lucrative property tax appeal practice and to shake down ComEd and AT&T for favors benefiting him and his political organization.
With some of the pillars of Illinois political culture for the last 50 years crumbling around them, you would think that the current leadership of the General Assembly might reflect on these developments and change their ways.
Nope.
Madigan and Maps may be gone from the Capitol, but many of their methods are still faithfully followed in the General Assembly.
For example, in a May 16, 2018, phone call between Mapes and McClain intercepted by the FBI and played for jurors during the trial, they discuss that the state budget that rank-and-file members of the General Assembly expected to vote on in a few days has not even been written yet despite the looming end of the fiscal year. In the budget enacted last May, even Democratic members openly complained on the floor of the House that they were not being included in the process of writing the state’s budget.
When the ComEd scandal broke, Madigan named Rep. Chris Welch (D-Chicago) to chair the special committee that would investigate charges against Madigan. Welch brazenly refused to conduct any meaningful investigation. Later, as it became clear that Madigan would not retain the speakership, it was with Madigan’s blessing that Welch succeeded him. It’s no wonder Welch has continued Madigan’s ways on ethics and elections too.
Madigan was never shy about helping the members of his family to benefit from his powerful position. He steered insurance business to his son. He got his wife appointed chair of the Illinois Arts Council. But Madigan’s biggest act of nepotism was one that also largely shielded him from state law enforcement scrutiny: He engineered the election of his daughter Lisa Madigan to the office of Attorney General.
Welch wasted no time emulating Madigan in this regard. Only a year after becoming Speaker, Welch’s wife, Shawnte Raines-Welch, announced her candidacy for Cook County Judge from a subcircuit in the area Welch represents. Raines-Welch defeated three others in the Democratic primary election despite being found “not qualified” by the Illinois State Bar Association.
Welch played a large role in fundraising for his wife’s campaign, reportedly soliciting his colleagues in the House Democratic caucus personally.
After Judge Raines-Welch won her election in November 2022, she was owed $50,000 from a loan she made to her own campaign committee. On December 1, 2022, two things happened: Welch’s campaign committee transferred $50,000 to his wife’s campaign committee, and Judge Raines-Welch’s campaign committee paid back the personal loan she had made to her campaign. Viola! Campaign loan disappears.
Madigan’s legacy of heavy-handed rule is not confined to the House chamber. Senate President Don Harmon (D-Oak Park) patterns his staff structure on the Madigan model and is just as active in thwarting efforts to reform gerrymandering and big money in judicial elections.
Harmon’s chief legal counsel is Giovanni Randazzo. Like Mapes, Randazzo holds other titles in the state Senate staff structure: Parliamentarian, the Ethics Officer, and the Freedom of Information Officer. In an irony only possible in the swamp of Springfield, as Ethics Officer, Randazzo reviews and certifies his own Statement of Economic Interests – a document that high ranking state officials are required to file.
Like Mapes before him, Randazzo also moonlights doing political work for campaign committees controlled by Harmon to the tune of over $50,000 in fees in the last three years.
Don Harmon picked up the ball where Madigan left off when it came to making sure the Supreme Court stayed under Democratic control after Madigan crony Thomas Kilbride was defeated for retention to the Illinois Supreme Court. While Harmon presided over the Illinois Senate in 2021, Democrats drew new Supreme Court districts for the first time since 1963.
As the 2022 election approached with two downstate Supreme Court seats open, Harmon’s operatives formed an Independent Expenditure committee called All for Justice. The contributions to All for Justice ranged from $3,000 to $500,000 and were almost exclusively from labor unions, trial lawyers, and Harmon and other State Senate Democrats. This campaign funding on-demand is right out of the Madigan playbook.
All for Justice filed the reports for the contributions it received, but not the required disclosure reports on its expenditures it was making – namely, television commercial time for the two Democratic Supreme Court candidates. State campaign finance and ethics expert Kent Redfield told the Chicago Tribune that the failure to file these expenditure reports as required under state law “denied the public, the news media and the people who participated in the campaigns full knowledge of what’s going on.”
All the while, in a trademark Madigan-style move, Welch, Harmon and Gov. JB Pritzker teamed up to gerrymander the Illinois General Assembly district boundaries and deny Illinoisans competitive campaigns for the House and Senate for the next 10 years. Never mind that Pritzker campaigned for Governor in 2018 on a pledge to veto any map that was not drawn fairly.
During the Mapes trial, jurors heard an FBI agent liken Madigan to a head of a mafia family in the secretive, closely guarded way he ran his vast enterprise. Indeed, Madigan is now under indictment for federal racketeering charges of the kind normally associated with some of Chicago’s most notorious organized crime figures. The 106-page indictment filed by federal prosecutors alleges that Madigan ruled his criminal enterprise by use of threats, intimidation, and extortion. It’s truly chilling stuff.
With the recent convictions in the ComEd 4 and Mapes trials as a preview of what’s to come in the Madigan trial scheduled to start on April Fool’s Day, Madigan must be approaching that day with dread that he will spend his golden years in a federal penitentiary.
Expect no more solace than that. Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch and Senate President Don Harmon have made Madigan’s ways standard operating procedure.