Following the opinion released today by the Illinois Supreme Court to reject House Republicans’ lawsuit against Democrats’ gerrymandered legislative maps based on the laches doctrine, or a lack of timeliness, Deputy House Republican Leader Ryan Spain (R-73rd District) released the following statement:
“This decision by the Illinois Supreme Court is infuriating. I think Leader McCombie expressed it perfectly – the court is doing the dirty work for an artificial supermajority of Democrats.
“It was Senator Dick Durbin who said, ‘The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards.’ He was speaking about the U.S. Supreme Court, of course, but I would confirm that the same statement applies to the Illinois Supreme Court as well.
“It’s ridiculous and unfair for the Court to make this kind of decision to disenfranchise voters and do the dirty work of the Democrats for them. It was the Court, not the defendants, who raised the laches/timeliness defense, something Justice Overstreet showed clearly to be meritless in his strongly worded dissent.”
Spain also pointed back to 2016 and the citizen-led petition for fair maps that was struck down on a technicality by former Justice Thomas Kilbride. Kilbride’s decision used John Hooker, now infamous in the ComEd Four scandal, as the plaintiff to give then Speaker Mike Madigan and Illinois Democrats power to gerrymander legislative maps. Kilbride then lost his supreme court seat in 2020 because of that decision, one of the very few times an Illinois Supreme Court Justice has not been retained by the voters.
In response to Kilbride’s loss, Democrats bent the political winds to their advantage, and they gerrymandered the entire Illinois Supreme Court in 2021. Then, even worse, in the 2022 election, Democratic legislative leaders spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the seats for Justice Elizabeth Rochford and Justice Mary Kay O’Brien. In addition, the controversial All for Justice political action committee spent $7 million on those court races, flouting the rules of disclosure for political spending, for which they were later hit with a $99,500 fine.
Spain continued, “We need comprehensive ethics reform for the Illinois Supreme Court like Chuck Schumer introduced in Washington. We need conflict of interest disclosure, rules for recusal, rules for the disclosure of gifts and travel activity, and all the things that contributed to allowing this absurd decision to be possible.
“Not even in Illinois, a place plagued by corruption, should you be able to buy seats on the Supreme Court to protect your artificial supermajorities in the legislature for years to come.”
A copy of the Illinois Supreme Court decision can be found below.