State legislators are like ants on a log. There are too lots of them and they’re too small, working round too quick to acknowledge as people, not to mention monitor their efforts. Even when the log is in your yard, why hassle paying consideration? Given the standard statehouse activity—dragging bits of legislative leaf round—solely probably the most devoted political junkies even hassle to attempt.
Often, although, one chief crops himself within the heart of the motion lengthy sufficient to supply a pathway not simply to grasp what’s happening in a single colony, but additionally to light up the final calamity poisoning our more and more poisonous nationwide political tradition: the cash, affect, rule bending, and self-dealing that deform authorities at each degree.
Meet Michael J. Madigan, the tight-mouthed enigma on the heart of the Illinois legislative anthill for greater than a 3rd of a century. Nicknamed “the Sphinx” for his expressionless silence and windblown longevity, Madigan was the final operative drive shaft from the outdated Daley Democratic machine—cast by Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s notorious mayor from 1955 to 1976— the place clout was constructed on a system of mutual assist: You vote the appropriate approach, and I’ll make positive your son will get a park district job. All through his profession, Madigan was chairman of the Democratic Social gathering of Illinois, committeeman of Chicago’s thirteenth Ward, and speaker of the Illinois Home for 36 years, the longest-serving chief of any legislative physique in American historical past.
Reviled by Republicans as “the middle of all evil in state authorities,” Madigan endured whereas governors got here and went. When Republican Jim Edgar grew to become governor in 1991, Madigan didn’t return his telephone requires months. Madigan didn’t want him; he was served by a patronage military of 400 drones beholden to him for jobs, raises, and promotions, who would leap to marketing campaign, knock on doorways, and buttonhole commuters to signal petitions. (Or, in a single notorious ploy, the other: hectoring residents of Madigan’s district to signal affidavits retracting their signatures on the nominating petitions of a 19-year-old who dared run towards the state’s strongest politician’s chosen alderman. The lad had no probability of successful, however so ruthlessly had the speaker’s operatives clawed signatures again that some 2,600 voters agreed to surrender signatures they’d by no means given.)
Madigan was an accepted actuality of life in Illinois, just like the climate, or, extra precisely, like God, a mysterious drive in His Heaven, spinning works and mysteries.
Then all of it modified.
First, the #MeToo revolution of 2018 rattled the Madigan group, taking down his longtime chief of workers, Tim Mapes, and prime aide, Kevin Quinn, amid accusations that Madigan didn’t do sufficient to cease them from sexually harassing their feminine colleagues. Daylight began pouring by the cracks. Madigan gave the first deposition in his life. The U.S. Division of Justice’s federal investigation into Madigan’s alleged corruption circled nearer. For years, Madigan had used an electrical utility firm, Commonwealth Edison, as a “crony job service” that issued direct funds to Madigan’s allies, such because the $4,500 a month it funneled to the Cook dinner County recorder of deeds, Ed Moody, for “consulting.” In return, Madigan superior laws that was favorable to the utility. He would additionally steer enterprise to his personal regulation agency, together with purchasers who had enterprise earlier than the state.
These machinations had lengthy been soiled secrets and techniques round Springfield, however now they have been coming into full view. Illinois Home Democrats, in November 2020, heard the hounds baying within the distance and balked at handing Madigan the speaker’s gavel—a once-unimaginable blasphemy. Compelled to give up the speakership, Madigan handed the baton over to his handpicked successor. Even after he resigned from the Home, it appeared that Madigan may exit together with his monumental dignity, secrets and techniques, and private freedom intact.
As a substitute, in early March, the DOJ indicted Madigan on 22 federal counts of racketeering and bribery, accusing him of working “a prison enterprise whose goal was to boost Madigan’s political energy and monetary well-being whereas additionally producing revenue for his political allies and associates.” The utmost sentence for the fees towards him is 20 years in jail.
Madigan pleaded not responsible.
Did Madigan, 79, lastly slip up in his senescence? Did he grow to be careless, or simply have the unhealthy luck to do the standard legislative horse buying and selling right into a federal wiretap? The query snakes by a extremely readable new e-book, The Home That Madigan Constructed: The Document Run of Illinois’ Velvet Hammer, by Ray Lengthy, himself a Springfield fixture, protecting the Illinois state capital for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Solar-Occasions (the place we have been colleagues), and elsewhere.
Lengthy was readily available to note the distinctive approach Madigan held the speaker’s gavel when he assumed energy in 1983. No percussive slams of his predecessors. Somewhat, he wrapped his fingers across the barrel and tapped the deal with, quietly.
“This can be a new period,” Madigan purred.
Not likely. Extra like the identical outdated period prettied as much as go by the porous barrier of ethics legal guidelines. Creativity was required. Madigan couldn’t simply hand out authorities jobs to reward his friends. That wasn’t carried out brazenly anymore. So ComEd would do it for him, allegedly. Madigan received loyalists every thing from work as meter readers and summer season internships to a seat on the utility’s board.
Lengthy presents the central query that legislators and lobbyists alike struggled with: “What does the speaker suppose?” Whereas neither Lengthy nor his readers have ESP, we are able to surmise what Madigan thought by what he did.
Three foremost currents: First, Madigan thought-about Chicago essential, for its personal proper and because the financial engine that drives Illinois. He thwarted efforts to strip management of O’Hare and Halfway airports from Chicago and provides it to a regional authority and stored Illinois tax {dollars} flowing to the Windy Metropolis. Whereas it might be an exaggeration to counsel that Chicago would have grow to be Detroit or Cleveland with out him, the actual fact is, it didn’t, and Madigan helped.
Second, he thought the legislature must be its personal unbiased, well-disciplined energy, coequal to the manager department and the courts. Whereas some legislative our bodies grow to be rubber stamps—good day, Chicago Metropolis Council—the legislature mattered underneath Madigan.
Lastly, he believed that Illinois must be reserved solely for the use and pleasure of the Democratic Social gathering. Certainly, the state grew to become a blue island in a sea of purple, jammed between Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest; Missouri, the place Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by 15 factors; Iowa, which has extra cattle than individuals; and Wisconsin, the place Scott Walker’s model of anti-union revanchism discovered alarming success.
This was carried out, partially, by “excessive” gerrymandering. Madigan redrew the state maps in 1981, 2001, and 2011. For all of the horror that Dems rightly really feel about present GOP efforts to undermine the mechanics of voting, no poll limitations surpass the feats of inventive cartography carving secure havens for Democrats and, when completely essential, ghettos the place Republican voters can have their say.
Even after the menace to our elections was made all too clear, Illinois Democrats carried on in October, dividing the state into 13 strongly Democratic districts, three strongly Republican seats, and only one extremely aggressive district.
Beside the rank hypocrisy, there’s one other value, specified by maybe probably the most reverberating passage in Lengthy’s e-book, when Barack Obama, who served as a state senator alongside Madigan, travels to Springfield in 2016 to warn how gerrymandering—fewer than 10 % of Home districts nationwide are aggressive—is harmful to democracy. When the districts grow to be much less aggressive between Democrats and Republicans, the primaries achieve extra foreign money, the place turnout is decrease and extremist candidates can take root. As a consequence, Obama stated, “our debates transfer away from the center, the place most Individuals are, towards the far ends of the spectrum, and that polarizes us additional.”
Not all of Lengthy’s e-book echoes with such significance. There’s a lot on elevating state taxes and grappling with the Land of Lincoln’s pension disaster, complicated knots of alliances untangled, and motivations parsed.
A number of chapters are set items, capturing the vicissitudes of Illinois politics. There’s the drama of June 30, 1988, as Republican Governor Jim Thompson joins Madigan to attempt to fund a brand new ballpark for the White Sox when the staff is all however on a airplane to Florida. The deed needed to be carried out earlier than midnight, when a change within the legislature’s make-up would doom the trouble. However Madigan “made time stand nonetheless”—actually. He stopped the clock at mid- night time in order that he and Thompson might twist arms whereas opponents sang that “Na na na na / Na na na na / Hey, hey-ey, goodbye” music that Sox followers use to jeer opposing pitchers off the area.
The episode is a lot enjoyable, with that near-biblical stopping of the solar, that it’s potential to miss—puff away the obfuscating fog of fandom—that authorities officers have been bending the regulation to place public cash into the pockets of a non-public enterprise.
Regardless of these moments of drama, on the finish of Lengthy’s e-book the Sphinx stays a cypher. Does he have buddies? Hobbies? An inside life? Lengthy by no means bothers to surprise. Robert Caro he isn’t. The most effective Lengthy can do is observe that Madigan “put successful above ideology. He demanded fanatical loyalty and received it. He outworked, outmaneuvered, and outlasted whoever received in his approach.”
For therefore lengthy, it appeared like without end. After which it was over—besides, in fact, for the pending trial.
Which brings us again to the ant world, the place Madigan traversed for therefore lengthy, and the place every colony has just one chief, served by a military of faceless employees. As people, we’re imagined to do higher in our social hierarchies. Certainly, in authorities, we’re imagined to by no means serve one man or girl however reasonably that noble and old school idea of the “widespread good.” However as Ray Lengthy’s useful new e-book factors out, one savvy politician can nonetheless skew your entire system to their bidding, for years and years—as long as they’ve the ingenuity, and the enablers, to drag it off.