Michael McCuskey, the Illinois legislature’s top ethics watchdog, is resigning the post after his tenure has become clouded by recent controversy following his investigation that determined a former state lawmaker’s sexual harassment of women violated state law.
McCuskey, a former state and federal judge, submitted a letter of resignation on Aug. 31 to the eight-member bipartisan, bicameral Legislative Ethics Commission. As the commission was posting a notice of vacancy in the office, McCuskey said he submitted an end date for his employment of Sept. 30 to finish his work.
It was unclear if the commission, made up of four Democrats and four Republicans, with two members from each of the House and Senate caucuses, would accept McCuskey’s end date or act to have him removed sooner. The commission also has the power to terminate McCuskey for cause.
But by posting the notice of vacancy and the process to fill it, the commission made it clear it was taking steps to remove McCuskey, who was appointed by the legislature in February 2022 to a term ending in mid-2028.
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Questions about McCuskey have become one more issue in the larger controversy over sexual harassment inside the Illinois Capitol, where now-former state Rep. Harry Benton, a Plainfield Democrat, resigned in July amid an investigation by McCuskey’s office.
While McCuskey found Benton had violated state law by engaging in sexual harassment, one of Benton’s victims, a female lobbyist, raised questions about McCuskey’s behavior during his investigation. She accused McCuskey of inaccurately characterizing her side of the story and, in a later letter sent to Illinois’ four top legislative leaders, she said McCuskey “violated the confidence of other victims and me, broke standard investigative norms, and made inappropriate comments” to her during their interview and in other interactions with her about her allegations against Benton.
McCuskey responded to the lobbyist’s initial complaints in an addendum to his Benton case filing, citing his background of 32 years in the state and federal judiciary, saying there were “no inaccuracies” in his report and that “I stand by it completely.”
The complaints about McCuskey followed questions about how House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch handled the Benton situation.
Earlier this year, Welch filed a complaint with the legislative inspector general after receiving a report of harassment about Benton regarding his behavior with the lobbyist. Around that time, another woman’s allegations from last year against Benton also became part of the complaint.
But a Tribune investigation published in July, before McCuskey’s report became public, detailed that Welch’s office had been made aware of a previous sexual harassment complaint regarding Benton nearly three years earlier, yet the speaker didn’t take any action against Benton and gave his reelection campaign $1.4 million a year later. A young female employee who had worked in Benton’s district office reported her allegations to the speaker’s then-chief of staff in April 2023, the Tribune found.
Welch, who became House speaker in 2021 after #MeToo issues helped lead to the downfall of veteran and now-imprisoned Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, has found his own leadership questioned for failing to act sooner against Benton. Welch also publicly apologized to the former Benton staffer for unrelated social media interactions Welch had with her that she said made her feel “uncomfortable.”
The whole issue raises questions about the efficacy of Illinois’ ethics laws, amid Welch’s promises to strengthen them, with the only resulting action so far being a deposed legislative watchdog and no substantive changes to the law.
State Rep. Mary Beth Canty of Arlington Heights, who chairs the House Democratic Women’s Caucus, raised similar concerns.
“McCuskey’s resignation is significant, but it does not end the culture of harassment that has persisted in Springfield for far too long,” Canty said in a statement. “We must strengthen the laws that guard against harassment, build a process that survivors can trust, and show the leadership required to earn the public’s confidence. The work is not finished.”
There are also questions about who would want to succeed McCuskey, as predecessors have been sharply critical of the limits lawmakers have placed on the office. It will be up to the four legislative leaders to put together a search committee for McCuskey’s replacement.
McCuskey took over for Carol Pope, also a former judge and an ex-Menard County state’s attorney, after she announced her resignation in 2021 over concerns she was hamstrung as the legislative inspector general. In her two-page resignation letter, which also came after investigations of sexual harassment issues, Pope called the office “essentially a paper tiger” that wasn’t effective enough at policing allegations of wrongdoing by legislators and legislative staff.
Pope has largely blamed her departure on an ethics overhaul measure passed in spring 2021 that good-government groups widely criticized for not going far enough to address public corruption in the state.
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“I thought I might be able to make a difference working from inside,” Pope wrote. “I thought I could be useful in improving the public’s view of the legislature and help bring about true ethics reform. Unfortunately, I have not been able to do so. This last legislative session has demonstrated true ethics reform is not a priority.”
Appearing Tuesday at an unrelated event at Illinois State University, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said he didn’t know enough about the issues surrounding McCuskey to call for his resignation. But he restated that it “should not be a long process” to reform ethics laws dealing with sexual harassment.
“We need to make sure that we’re implementing for people who are subject to sexual harassment and have claims, they should be able to adjudicate those claims quickly, and we should be able to get to a conclusion quickly,” the governor said.
Tony McCombie, the House GOP leader, of Savanna, said McCuskey’s departure provided “an opportunity to strengthen” the legislative inspector general’s office as well as “to fix the culture of harassment apparent within the House majority, and update Illinois’ ethics laws” and that Republicans were prepared to move ahead in the post-general election fall veto session.
McCuskey, 78, was appointed to finish Pope’s term as legislative inspector general through a joint legislative resolution on a mostly party-line vote in 2022. In 2023, the legislature reappointed him, this time with little opposition, to a five-year term set to expire on June 30, 2028, his 80th birthday.
Before his time as legislative inspector general, President Bill Clinton appointed McCuskey as a federal district court judge, a position he held from 1998 to 2014. For roughly eight of those years, McCuskey served as chief judge for the Central District of Illinois.
Before joining the federal bench, McCuskey served as a state court judge at the trial and appellate levels.
A former teacher, McCuskey also once served as chair of the board of trustees at Illinois State University, his undergraduate alma mater.