The Chicago Bar Association puts on a show each Christmas where the lawyers dance a little, tell a few jokes and sing some songs.
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This year, they should learn the lyrics to an old country tune by Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. It’s called, “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away.”
They can sing it to James Heiple and Michael Bilandic.
The terms of the two best-known members of the Illinois Supreme Court are up next year. They were expected to retire, Bilandic finishing a long political career and Heiple putting the rest of us out of our misery.
But they won’t go away. At least, they won’t tell anybody they’re going away.
Bilandic is 76, so he’s a year past the court’s mandatory retirement age. That means he can’t run for retention, where he would appear alone on the ballot and voters would say “yes” or “no” on whether he keeps his job for another 10 years.
Because the law says Bilandic has to retire, the race to fill his vacancy has been raging for more than a year. For the Democrats, it’s a choice between the highly esteemed Thomas Fitzgerald, presiding judge of the Cook County Criminal Court; Appellate Judge William Cousins; and Appellate Judge Morton Zwick, a former Republican and pork-belly trader who once ran for state representative against an incumbent who happened to be his ex-wife.
But hang on. Bilandic still is in the picture. The law says he can’t run for retention. But the law doesn’t say he can’t run in the election to replace him.
And Bilandic says that replacing himself is a distinct possibility. He could jump in the race. “Anything could happen,” he told me this week. “I really enjoy this. I think I could do this for another 20 years.”
The betting in legal circles is that Bilandic is just having a little fun, keeping everyone guessing, and that in the end he won’t run out of respect for Fitzgerald.
But Heiple is another story. He always has been another story, hasn’t he?
Heiple has the option of running for retention, which would give him another 10 years on the bench. But after his infamous run-in with the Pekin police force, his censure by the Illinois Courts Commission, his resignation as chief justice, the failed effort to impeach him and his appearance on Top Ten lists of America’s worst judges, a lot of people figured Heiple would go away quietly rather than give voters the chance to kick him out.
Heiple’s departure would set up an interesting Republican primary between state Sen. Carl Hawkinson, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Appellate Judge William Holdridge, a protege and defender of Heiple. Being a protege and defender of Heiple is about as heavy a millstone as being Bill Clinton’s vice president, meaning Holdridge probably would lose the primary.
Even if Holdridge won the primary, he probably would lose the general election. Appellate Judges Peg Breslin and Thomas Homer would be likely Democratic candidates. A Democrat would be very competitive in the central Illinois district, especially against a Heiple apologist. Heiple barely won in 1990 against Democrat Tobias Barry.
But Heiple won’t tell anyone, including his colleagues on the Supreme Court, whether he will run again or step aside.
And that has sparked some whispers in the last few weeks that he has one more “gotcha” game to play on all of his critics.
Heiple has to declare by Dec. 6 whether he will run for retention. If he says “yes,” he goes on the ballot the following November. If he says “no,” then there is a vacancy and everybody has a shot at running for it.
Heiple wouldn’t talk to me this week, but he has been saying through a court spokesman that he will announce his decision on Dec. 6–the last possible moment.
If he knows what he’s going to do, why wait? Maybe just to stall all his would-be successors.
But here’s another scenario:
Heiple could declare on Dec. 6 that he will run for retention, and then change his mind a few months from now and decide to retire. Under law, it would be too late to hold an election in 2000 to succeed him.
So Heiple could block everybody from running for his seat, he could step down next year, and the Supreme Court would choose his replacement. Heiple still has a few friends on the Supreme Court, and it’s likely he could persuade the other justices to show him professional courtesy and choose his buddy Holdridge.
Then Holdridge would serve on the court for two years and he could run in 2002 with all the pomp and trappings and deference shown a sitting justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, and he would win.
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Would Heiple stoop to such machinations? Remember, this is the guy who let the other Supreme Court judges elect him chief justice without telling them he was under investigation by the Judicial Inquiry Board. This is the guy who nominated his friend, Justice Moses Harrison, to head the Illinois Courts Commission, just 10 days before charges against Heiple were filed with the commission.
There won’t be much excitement in the 2000 election in these parts. There’s no race for governor, no race for senator. The presidential primaries will be all but over by the time they get to Illinois.
But there will be four seats on the Illinois Supreme Court in play. Justice Charles Freeman will run for retention in Cook County, there’s a seat open in the suburbs, and then there are the will-they-won’t-they twins, Bilandic and Heiple.
Supreme Court elections are supposed to be genteel affairs, consumed by weighty legal discussions and reverential references to Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Forget it. The judges play politics for keeps.