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On Aug. 13, Illinois saw the indictment hammer fall on a
powerful lawmaker for a fourth time since federal investigators began raiding
government offices last year.
Prosecutors charged state Sen. Terry Link, D-Indian Creek, with a felony count
of tax evasion. Link, who has held his senate seat since 1997, is not the most
high-profile Illinois political leader implicated in the escalating federal
probe – that title belongs to House Speaker Mike Madigan – but his case stands
out for its layers of irony.
For instance, Link didn’t resign his seat on the Legislative Ethics Commission
until after his indictment became public – meaning he’d spent months serving on
a panel in charge of ethics investigations while cooperating with federal agents
because he was the subject of such an investigation.
Despite allegedly evading his own income taxes, Link voted in favor of sending
Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s “fair tax” amendment to voters’ November ballots. Their
proposal would not just raise income taxes on Illinoisans, but on over 100,000
of the state’s small businesses that create most of the state’s jobs and have
been battered by a pandemic-induced recession. Pritzker, too, is under federal
investigation after admitting he dodged his own property taxes.
The absurdities were punctuated by the feds’ timing, indicting Link mere hours
after a group of his fellow Democrats assembled to push the urgency of ethics
reform as a priority during veto session in November. Republicans had called on
Pritzker to order an special session to take up ethics legislation immediately
after the Madigan revelations, to the governor’s great disinterest.
Elsewhere, all this might be mistaken for a series of cheap twists in a hacky
political tragicomedy. But the hypocrisies on display in the Link case reveal
plenty about how corruption thrives in Illinois and some basic insights in
understanding how to contain it.
A case in point is the ethics commission on which Link until recently served.
Lawmakers appoint other lawmakers to sit on it.
If you were to guess that Illinois politicians might not be the group most eager
to hold Illinois politicians accountable for wrongdoing, you’d guess correctly.
In February, former Legislative Inspector General Julie Porter testified the
commission had in multiple instances suppressed her attempts to bring evidence
of lawmaker criminality to light.
“When I did find wrongdoing and sought to publish it, state legislators charged
with serving on the Legislative Ethics Commission blocked me,” Porter said. Link
served on the commission at the time.
In Illinois, the state’s top legislative watchdog is forced to first seek
permission to open investigations from the same group of people who are supposed
to be subject to them. Absent true independence, the legislative inspector
general’s existence is meaningless.
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The resulting lack of oversight has helped
encourage decades of unethical practices in the General Assembly,
earning Illinois the ranking of second-most corrupt state in the
nation and House Speaker Mike Madigan a concentration of power
unrivaled in the U.S. The most severe public policy consequence is
over $240 billion in pension debt, courtesy of decades of unkeepable
promises made to public sector unions in exchange for their
political loyalty and cash.
Which brings us back to the “fair tax.” Massive
pension liabilities above all else have bred an unhealthy dependence
on tax increases. While benignly marketed as a tax increase “on the
rich,” there is in fact nothing in the amendment protecting
Illinoisans lower on the socio-economic scale. In fact, starting
rates would relieve low-income Illinoisans of just $6 for a $1,800
state and local tax burden – the third-highest on that income group
in the U.S. The debts incurred by the state, coupled with the tax
plan’s inadequate revenue projections, would all but necessitate tax
hikes creeping into lower brackets, as happened when Connecticut
swapped its flat income tax system for a progressive one under
economic stress.
With the progressive tax campaign, lawmakers aim to sell voters a
shovel to entrench the status quo by advertising it as a weapon with
which to fight against it. Already, four of its supporters in the
legislature have received federal indictments; while its most
noteworthy champion, speaker Madigan, is at the center of a
high-profile bribery scandal.
The optics have forced Pritzker to beg Illinoisans not to associate
his tax plan with Madigan, but no bill reaches the House floor
without Madigan’s distinct blessing. Far more than being associated,
Madigan and Pritzker are the tax plan’s proud parents.
A progressive tax system would give more power over income tax rates
to the very state legislature Madigan controls, and under whose
watch corruption festers. Forcing needed reforms on an unwilling
state government instead requires denying it the option to endlessly
subsidize poor policymaking.
Chicago Magazine wrote last year of Terry Link, then-assistant
majority leader, that he’d “have the task of whipping votes to place
the progressive income tax on next year’s ballot.”
He succeeded. But the next hurdle will be much harder to clear than
a legislative supermajority passing a politicized ballot referendum
on a party-line vote.
And that’s asking voters to trust their state government with more
taxing power by approving a referendum championed by a governor
under investigation for tax fraud, greenlit by a House speaker
facing a bribery lawsuit and steered to voters’ ballots by a senator
indicted for refusing to pay his own taxes.
In a state whose residents have already been asked to shoulder
endless tax hikes and to hold their noses through decades of
corruption scandals, it shouldn’t be surprising if voters decide
their trust is simply too much to ask for.
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