The Democratic-controlled Illinois House pushed through a new legislative watchdog on Thursday over objections from Republicans who charged that the majority party skirted the law to install its hand-picked candidate.
Michael McCuskey, a retired Democratic judge who served on the state and federal benches, was approved as the new legislative inspector general on a near-party-line vote Thursday in the House after a straight party-line vote a day earlier in the Senate.
He takes on the watchdog role at a time when lawmakers are under intense scrutiny amid an ongoing corruption probe that has led to charges against more than half a dozen current and former Democratic state lawmakers and toppled longtime House Speaker Michael Madigan.
The legislative inspector general’s office has been vacant for about a month after the departure of Carol Pope, a former Republican state prosecutor and appellate judge who resigned in protest last year over a government ethics overhaul that she said “demonstrated true ethics reform is not a priority” for the scandal-plagued legislature.
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Members of a bipartisan ethics panel deadlocked along party lines over naming Pope’s replacement, with each side accusing the other of obstruction.
“What you’re seeing today is a total distortion of what we should have in this body,” Republican state Rep. Avery Bourne, who sponsored Pope’s nomination in 2019, said during Thursday’s House debate. “It is beyond disappointing because we were proud then to appoint a permanent (legislative inspector general) who would police this body and restore honor to that office and start a process of true ethics reform in the house.”
Bourne, the running mate of GOP gubernatorial candidate Richard Irvin, said there’s a “crisis of confidence in the legislature being able to police themselves.”
But state Rep. Kelly Burke, a Democrat from Evergreen Park, said the process to fill the position by the commission was “exhaustive” and she blamed the process for being stalled by the Republicans “for political purposes.”
“Judge McCuskey is a highly respected judge. As an appointee to the federal bench, he’s been vetted thoroughly,” said Burke, who sits on the ethics commission. “He was interviewed at length by the members of the legislative ethics commission, all of whom, even Republican members, acknowledge his experience and suitability for the office.”
Republicans on the eight-member Legislative Ethics Commission said Democrats derailed the process by pushing for McCuskey and a previous candidate, neither of whom was initially recommended by an outside search committee.
The Democrats said their members on the ethics commission were prepared to send names of two candidates to the full General Assembly for consideration but Republicans on the panel blocked that action.
“You know what I find offensive?” Senate President Don Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat, said during a heated debate Wednesday. “The Republican members of the Legislative Ethics Commission saying, ‘If we don’t get to pick our hand-picked inspector general, then nobody gets to pick an inspector general.'”
Republicans were backing Joseph Hartzler, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and was recommended by the search committee. Harmon described Hartzler as a veteran of GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration “with a deep partisan streak.”
Because of the deadlock, Democrats moved forward with McCuskey’s nomination to avoid a prolonged vacancy in the inspector general’s office, an issue that thrust the relatively obscure post into the spotlight as the #MeToo movement hit Springfield in 2017 as the office sat empty.
“I’ve lived through that,” Harmon said. “We don’t want to do that. We want a well-qualified legislative inspector general. Judge McCuskey fills the bill. I dare you to vote no.”
Republican Sen. Jil Tracy of Quincy, who chairs the ethics commission, said McCuskey indicated he would have been willing to serve in an interim role to allow the commission to reopen the search process outlined in state law so that he could be vetted along with other candidates.
Had he done that, “I think he very much would be accepted,” Tracy said.
“The Democrats, being in the supermajority, have just gotten so used to breaking the rules and just ramrodding things through,” she said.
Harmon’s contention that Republicans were trying to install their hand-picked candidate is “utterly wrong,” she said.
McCuskey, who could not be reached for comment, was appointed to the U.S. District Court in central Illinois by Democratic President Bill Clinton and confirmed by a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate in 1998.
As a federal judge in Urbana, McCuskey issued rulings in several high-profile cases, including a 2000 decision to uphold the Decatur School Board’s expulsions of five students who were involved in a fight at a high school football game. The ruling came in a civil rights lawsuit brought by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition that attracted national attention.
In another case with national prominence, McCuskey ruled in 1999 that former FBI mole Mark Whitacre, the inspiration for the Matt Damon film “The Informant,” had to repay more than $1 million in salary and benefits to agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland Co.
In 2003, he ordered a new trial for death row inmate Gordon “Randy” Steidl, who was charged with a 1986 double murder in downstate Paris, writing that it was “reasonably probable” that Steidl would have been acquitted if a jury had been allowed to hear the full evidence. Steidl was released the following year.
While not a major donor to political campaigns, McCuskey’s contributions have largely gone to Democratic candidates and committees, most recently a $250 contribution in October to the Democratic Party of Illinois.
He was appointed to the Illinois State University board of trustees in 2005 by then-Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich and was chairman from 2008 to 2014.
McCuskey has at least one issue awaiting him. In her final quarterly report for 2021, Pope said her office had received a complaint that it had not begun investigating due to her impending departure.
House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Hillside Democrat, decried the fact that in Pope’s absence, a legislative inspector general complaint was left uninvestigated. He explained why that kind of dereliction of duty should end now.
“We brought before you an exceptionally qualified person who wants this job, who will do a great job,” said Welch. “No one has questioned his integrity. No one has questioned whether he will be independent. Every single person that has spoken here today has said what an honorable person Judge McCuskey is.”
After the state’s first legislative inspector general resigned in 2014, the position went unfilled until a victims’ rights advocate testified at a legislative hearing in October 2017 that her complaint alleging she’d been sexually harassed by a state senator went unanswered for more than a year.
The blowback led to the temporary appointment of former federal prosecutor Julie Porter
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, who held the position until Pope took over in March 2019.McCuskey’s predecessors have called for greater independence. In response, the ethics overhaul approved last year allows the inspector general to launch investigations without first getting approval from the ethics commission.
But the inspector general still has to get the commission’s permission to issue subpoenas or publicly release reports on lawmakers who are found to have engaged in misconduct. One of Pope’s major objections was that the new law also limits the scope of the office’s investigations to complaints that relate directly to lawmakers’ public duties.
Dan Petrella reported from Chicago.