Insiders refer to Mike Madigan’s annual fundraising bash as the “Kiss the Ring” party–a ritual worthy of a Damon Runyon tale where high and mighty swells pay both cash and homage to a force even higher and mightier.
In its most recent incarnation at a plush North Side hotel last month, the Democratic Illinois House Speaker extended his hand to a receiving line nearly a football field in length and filled with powerful, moneyed folk who rarely wait for much in life.
Cooling his heels patiently was Philip Corboy, the hotshot personal injury lawyer whose livelihood can turn on any number of legislative actions. There was Emmett McNamara of the electrical workers union and John Hooker, a lobbyist for Commonwealth Edison, both with big stakes in utility deregulation.
Also in the queue were nursing home executive Leon Shlofrock, with an interest in Medicaid funding; Herb Gardner of United Airlines, which hopes to drive a stake in any notion of a new regional airport; and former U.S. Atty. Fred Foreman, a lifetime Republican who lobbies for a variety of interests, including expanded riverboat gambling.
They weren’t there for the stuffed shrimp and smooth scotch.
Special interests waving checkbooks as they cozy with Illinois lawmakers is hardly a shock. But the relationship, a Tribune computer analysis of campaign disclosure reports shows, has transformed Madigan and a tiny corps of legislative leaders into a new class of political kingmakers.
It has enabled them to corner the market on campaign cash and given them the financial clout to bend House and Senate members to their will. They virtually dictate who can run for a seat in the legislature. All of that raises disturbing questions about whether many lawmakers owe their first allegiance to their constituents or to their financial patrons.
Even as Washington is consumed with campaign finance scandals these days, Illinois seems blissfully clean. That is for one simple reason: There are essentially no rules to break. What’s more, reforms in the early 1980s intended to streamline the legislature actually have helped leaders in recent years increase and consolidate their might.
“Illinois is the only state in our region, and maybe in the country, where the leadership exerts its control over members primarily through money,” observed Paul Cohan, Midwest publications director for the Kentucky-based Council on State Governments.
More than $67 million was raised to wage legislative campaigns last November–up a whopping 54 percent from the previous election in 1994. Only a fraction of that money came from small donors.
Even as business, labor and political groups anted up record contributions to sway votes, they also steered more and more of that money away from rank-and-file members and into the war chests of the leaders: Democrat Madigan and Republican Lee Daniels in the House and Republican James “Pate” Philip and Democrat Emil Jones Jr. in the Senate.
That quartet is known collectively in Springfield as The Four Tops.
In confirming suspicions that a lion’s share of campaign money is increasingly filtered through legislative leaders, the Tribune study laid out a detailed blueprint showing how power has become more concentrated in Illinois politics.
One of every three dollars raised by candidates for House and Senate seats last November came not from fat-cat benefactors but from campaign accounts controlled by Madigan, Daniels, Philip or Jones, records show.
Even that figure understates their might. In races that were even moderately close–those where a hefty injection of outside cash could conceivably have altered the outcome–the Four Tops’ share of campaign funding rises to exactly half.
One-third of the 238 candidates seeking House or Senate seats across the state last November derived at least 25 percent of their financial backing from the leaders, and one of every five candidates got 50 percent or more.
Sen. Christine Radogno (R-La Grange), got $562,916 in cash and campaign services from Philip to capture an open seat in the southwest suburbs. That amounted to 76 percent of the $741,144 in total contributions she raised to win a job that pays a base annual salary of just $48,403.
“There isn’t a Republican Party or a Democratic Party anymore; there’s a Mike Madigan Party or a Pate Philip Party,” said political scientist Kent Redfield of the University of Illinois at Springfield. Redfield, in conjunction with the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, compiled the data analyzed by the Tribune.
For decades, a portrait of how money flowed in and out of the political system and how it influenced public policy was beyond reach because campaign finance reports–mountains of them and all on paper–swamped the State Board of Elections. Recent computerization of the records now makes such an analysis possible.
More Top Picks Best Compound Bows For Beginners
Though the study focused on Illinois, the implications could be far broader. Even as the U.S. Senate debates broad campaign finance reforms, many prominent Republicans–House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott among them–have suggested fundraising limits are a cumbersome infringement on freedom of expression and should be scrapped entirely.
A gaze into the crystal ball of Gingrich and Lott might look a lot like the situation in Illinois today.
No rules, no problems
When it comes to money and politics, experts say Illinois could be the most wide-open, laissez-faire, anything-goes state in the nation. The federal government and many states limit the size of campaign gifts and bar companies and unions from making direct contributions at all. But in Illinois there are essentially no curbs on who can give, when they can give or–most important–how much they can give.
The Illinois State Medical Society, which prodded the then-Republican-run legislature last session to cap expensive malpractice awards, shoveled $545,561 to funds controlled by Daniels and Philip in 1995 and 1996.
At the same time, the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, which leaned on Democrats to fight the caps, gave $68,500 to funds run by Madigan and Jones and another $402,567 to other Democratic lawmakers.
The money flowing to the leaders has helped fuel a political arms race, with the four grappling for control of their respective chambers by picking proxy candidates in key districts and then backing them with unprecedented resources.
Just as Cold War superpowers feared missile gaps, Illinois’ legislative powers now fret over campaign-spending gaps.
Philip and Jones fought to a standoff in 1996, enabling Republicans to retain control of the Senate. But Madigan wrested the speakership from Daniels, recapturing control of the House from Republicans with a slim one-seat Democratic majority.
Both Daniels and Madigan deny they use their piles of campaign cash to keep members in line.
“I do encourage members to vote certain ways on certain legislation,” said Daniels. “But I’m not one that strong-arms people. I seek consensus.”
Radogno acknowledges the perception among some that she’s a Philip puppet, but she denies ever feeling squeezed on a vote.
“I’m very much aware that leadership needs me as much as I need them,” she said. “If I don’t vote my district and please my constituents first and foremost, I won’t be back.”
But Tinley Park Mayor Ed Zabrocki, a former GOP House member who resigned in disgust midway through his first term in 1995, said the pressure he felt was far more subtle.
“Never once did (Daniels) say, `Please vote this way,’ ” Zabrocki recalled. “But when you are beholden to someone and you’re looking at the next race and you’ve got to raise at least $200,000, there certainly is something implied.”
Seeking more bang for their campaign buck, special interests have been only too happy to oblige the leadership wars.
Of the $3.4 million given by lawyers and law firms to elect legislative candidates, 53 percent went directly to leaders. Manufacturing interests and the mining industry also steered 53 percent of their gifts the leadership’s way. Doctors, hospitals and others in the medical industry showered legislators with $4 million in campaign gifts, almost half of which went to leadership.
Like a broken record, the trend repeats over and over through a variety of special interests. Trade and public employee unions also gave $4 million to legislative campaigns, steering 44 percent to the leadership.
The horse racing industry ponied up $328,595, of which $191,279, or 58 percent, went to the Four Tops. Riverboat casino interests targeted 68 percent of their $685,654 in legislative contributions to leadership. Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, steered 76 percent of its $313,320 in contributions leadership’s way.
The downside of change
The money-driven leadership wars are a relatively recent phenomenon in Illinois politics. Ironically, a central catalyst may have been a political reform aimed at streamlining the legislature.
For more than a century, the state had a quirky system called cumulative voting that sent three House members to Springfield from each district. Only two of the three could be from the same party, ensuring minority representation in every corner of the state. There were even Chicago Republicans and DuPage County Democrats.
Zabrocki said one of the fondest memories of his brief tenure in Springfield was retreating under the balcony of the House chamber to smoke cigars with old-timer Roger McAuliffe, the last Chicago Republican holdover from the cumulative-voting days.
McAuliffe, who has since died, talked wistfully about how much more independent and unpredictable lawmakers were in those days. “When you had three legislators from each district, you had to make coalitions and it destroyed pockets of power,” Zabrocki recalls his friend as explaining.
Then in a 1980 referendum spearheaded by political activist Patrick Quinn, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that did away with cumulative voting and trimmed the House from 178 members to 118.
Quinn sold the movement as a streamlining of state government, and indeed it paid dividends–at least for Quinn, who was elected to one term as state treasurer. But the change he effected gradually undercut the ad hoc coalition building in the House, and the will and capability of rank-and-file members to resist leadership began to wither.
It is an axiom of politics that rhetoric and actions don’t always seem to track, and campaign reform proposals could be Exhibit A.
Daniels, for one, has called the amount of money spent in campaigns these days “obscene.” But that didn’t stop him from raising $8.5 million to pull the strings on a number of legislative campaigns over the previous two years.
Madigan matched his rival dollar for dollar during the same period. At his recent fundraiser, he cleared another $1 million. Then, with the checks in the bank, a week later he decried the corrupting influence of money in politics and proposed political funding curbs, including a $1,500 limit per election for individuals and $3,000 for unions and corporations.
A closer look at the plan raises questions about whether Madigan was truly pushing for reform or simply jockeying for another way to get a fundraising edge.
It would only nibble at campaign funding excess and do nothing to scale back a lucrative source of revenue for Madigan: cash that sloshes back and forth between different political committees, obscuring the source of the original donor.
If Madigan’s reform plan had been in place in 1995 and 1996 (and assuming, naively, that no one would have taken advantage of gaping loopholes contained in the plan), it would have forced a 19 percent scaleback in Madigan’s own campaign receipts and an 18 percent cut in contributions controlled by fellow Democrat Jones, calculations by the Tribune determined.
But Republican leaders would have taken a far greater revenue hit: 32 percent for Daniels and 46 percent for Philip, who is decidedly cool to the notion of campaign curbs regardless of the numbers.
Even one of Madigan’s own lieutenants thinks the plan fails the sniff test.
“He wants to be the sole decider of who’s going to be elected and who’s not going to be elected,” said Rep. Ralph Capparelli, a veteran Chicago Democrat and an assistant House majority leader. “What do you want, a dictatorship?”
In Illinois, lawmakers have essentially emasculated the state elections board, the state agency in charge of monitoring campaign finance rules, without incurring voter wrath. Funding cuts have gutted staffing levels and the agency has been stripped of authority.
It is virtually powerless to do anything more than require candidates to file forms detailing campaign contributions and spending and levy small fines if they don’t.
More Top Picks Ph Soil
Spokesman Dan White said the agency can’t even stop candidates from pocketing their campaign money, an act that would be a felony if committed by a candidate for Congress but which is legal in Illinois.
“We don’t question it or have any authority to do so,” he explained. “As long as they’re disclosing it, that satisfies the law in Illinois.”
More than two decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that campaign contributions were a protected form of free speech and could not be outlawed. But they could be regulated and limited.
Across the country, only Idaho puts as few restrictions on its political candidates as does Illinois. Arizona bans gifts from corporations and labor unions and limits individuals to giving $270 to a candidate for the legislature. Colorado bars lobbyists from making contributions while the legislature is in session. Florida puts a $500 lid on most contributions.
Among reformers, the gold standard is widely considered to be Wisconsin, a state that takes its ethics seriously. Wisconsin legislators are forbidden by law to accept so much as a free cup of coffee from a lobbyist, whereas few in Illinois would be shocked if lawmakers here not only guzzled the lobbyist’s java but also consumed a free four-course meal and walked away with the cutlery and place settings.
Even in Wisconsin, however, there has been considerable hand wringing about spiraling spending and special interest money influencing campaigns. Increasingly, candidates in tight races are opting to bypass a voluntary system of public funding that underwrites candidates who agree to spending limits with taxpayer stipends.
“Once you opt out of the public-funding system you’re off to the races,” explained Sen. Lynn Adelman, a suburban Milwaukee Democrat who narrowly won re-election last year.
Adelman spent $113,000 on his general election campaign last year, a record high for Wisconsin. That was just barely above the Illinois average for Illinois Senate candidates.
“The amount of money going into Illinois campaigns is exploding,” said Chuck Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity.
“At the same time, fewer and fewer people are turning out to vote. You’re seeing a cynicism and a distrust of politicians at the same time politicians are getting more money from a small group of interests. Is this a democracy, or a plutocracy?”
HOW THE TRIBUNE ANALYZED FUNDING
The Tribune’s report on Illinois campaign finances is based on records of more than 88,000 separate contributions and 23,000 expenditures reported to the State Board of Elections by candidates for state office in 1995 and 1996.
The investigation was assisted by computer databases created by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based non-profit, non-partisan research group, and Kent Redfield of the Illinois Legislative Studies Center at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The Tribune conducted its own analysis of the data.