With apologies to Rich Miller and the folks who made Schoolhouse Rock.
SB1608 would increase the number of Cook County subcircuit judgeships from 165 to 270 by eliminating 94 countywide and 11 associate judge positions as they come open. (Full text of the bill here.)
So, with the subcircuit boundaries being redrawn this year, this could be a very big deal.
If it passes.
What are the odds?
Well, at the moment, the bill has only one sponsor. That's a bad sign.
But that one sponsor is Asst. Majority Leader/Senate President Pro Tempore Bill Cunningham of Beverly. So there's at least some juice behind this proposal.
Given the blinding rapidity with which a proposal can be swept into law in the final minutes of the legislative session, the sluggish movement of the bill in the Senate so far means absolutely nothing.
So we'll see.
Don't blink.
Posts
19 comments:
If this is to become law the more likely scenario is that this language gets added to another bill (possibly the subcircuit remap bill?) to aid with its passage.
Bill Cunningham is my senator and he has never had an original thought about the judiciary his entire life. The real catalyst for this is to increase the subcircuit numbers for what is currently the 3rd Sub. Not all Irish are female and some of them don’t want to run countywide. Especially not what happened to so many of them in 2020. Seems Latinas and the Sistas have gotten hip to their Emerald Isle name game bull**it and will stop electing them countywide. Sorry, Bill. Three already has an entire complement of 13 judges while other subs are still — 30 f’ing years later waiting for their full compliment.
Sincerely,
Ashamed Irish Male of Beverly
@Ashamed -- Not being personally acquainted with Sen. Cunningham, I can not respond to your less than charitable opinion about the originality of his thought processes.
But, at least with the aid of a calculator, I can divide by 15. The 165 currently authorized subcircuit vacancies should result in 11 judges in each subcircuit, not 13.
There are two subcircuits that do not yet have their assigned compliment of judges because there are still two judges serving in positions (city only or county only) that were the source of the subcircuit vacancies. This is down from 3 after the late Alexander White's vacancy was assigned to the 2nd Subcircuit for the 2020 election. I had a copy of the Supreme Court Order setting the order in which vacancies would be assigned, but I can't find it this evening. But I believe that 13 subcircuits have their full compliment of 11 judges and 2 have only 10.
Naturally, it's not quite that simple: I did count 12 3rd Subcircuit judges listed on the Illinois Supreme Court website this evening -- maybe it's the lateness of the hour, or the fact that I couldn't use a calculator for this purpose, but that's what I counted -- and I'm not sure what accounts for this. Perhaps a reader can explain?
In any event, if passed, each subcircuit would gain another 7 seats, not just the 3rd Subcircuit... or whatever the 3rd Subcircuit becomes in the remap.
Clock. Bait.
Cunningham is doing the party’s dirty work. Translation: Harmon don’t want his fingers in this one. The Party is trying to diminish Evans’ power. And the only power he has is to assign judges and appoint associates. Fewer associates means less power. Tom is too out of touch to see it coming. His judicial colleagues are too full of them selves to recognize this power play either.
Reduces the associates by 11? Hmm. So if this passes this year, Tim won’t have any associate judge party favors to use as leverage for the 2022 Chief Judge election? Hmmmm. Harmon and Toni are good. Really good. Somebody wake up Tim from his nap and connect the dots for him. Better yet, let him sleep.
Svengali
I am amazed at the anti-Evans sentiments expressed here. Not that there are anti-Evans sentiments -- these are legion, and I only pass through the arguably civil -- but, rather, at the suppleness and flexibility of the anti-Evans bunch, turning this proposal into still another front in their vision of the never ending war of Tim and Toni.
This proposal, on its face, would seem to cost the Cook County Democratic Party dearly. Lawyers with discretionary income and judicial ambitions are all too eager to toss great gobs of the former in their efforts to further the latter -- and that's before the 'assessment' or voluntary contribution is extracted in tribute from the candidates on whom the County Party has bestowed its favor.
And, under this proposal, there would be fewer of these. It would most definitely pinch the purse... all for the opportunity to deprive Judge Evans of one class of AJs once? Seems highly unlikely.
(And for all the anti-Evans furor in the comments, he somehow manages to be reelected Chief Judge over and over and over again. It's almost as if you can't really gauge public sentiment, or the sentiment of any particular electorate, from Internet comments. If you went strictly from comments online, you might have expected Ron Paul to have been elected President twice by landslide some years ago -- and though I try to avoid watching the national news, I don't think that happened. And yet people still think Twitter properly expresses the public mood! But I digress. Sorry.)
To return to the designated narrative thread, while individual committeemen exert outsized authority over subcircuit selection processes, the ability of the County Party to control, or even influence, slating in the subcircuits is tenuous at best. At absolute best. And that's assuming that a subcircuit does, as the County Party strongly recommends, hold a public slating process that the County Party can oversee. And referee, if necessary.
But subcircuits have been frequently noncompliant with this.
Seems to me that the only obvious beneficiary of this legislation would be those strong committeemen (of various ethnicities) who have always had great sway in subcircuit selection and now would have more vacancies within their gift. Seems to me that the Evans v. Preckwinkle angle does not fit here. And it seems to me that the prospects of this proposition are somehow tied into the new subcircuit map process. Perhaps this is a bargaining chip. But those of us on the outside can only guess at the game really being played.
Jack,
Evans gets elected despite the animosity so many Circuit Judges harbor against him because of math and "favors." They all earn the same amount of money. So the only true currency is "power" and "prestige," which is measured by assignments and "promotions" to supervisor or presiding judgeships; or occasional treats such as making associate judges out of the children or family members of retired circuits.
Evans pulls the lever to decide who gets what and there is always a price: re-electing Evans as Chief. In turn, he can continue to hire his friends and family to suck off the Circuit Judge payroll. That's the game. If the life expectancy of his tenure as Chief Judge was dependent on productivity and dispensing justice, then the Law Division (among others) would sure as hell would have had a better and timely response to the pandemic other than waiting for everyone in the world to be vaccinated -- which in essence was Evans' plan.
Toni and Harmon and the Party want those judgeships so that they can play their slating game. It's not about perceived in-fighting between Evans and Toni. Evans is Toni's rearview mirror having laid him out years ago as 4th Ward Alderman.
The pond is getting smaller and the dinosaurs are about to be vanquished, convicted or put on an iceberg to float away like a dying Eskimo.
Sincerely,
Darwin
Hi Jack,
Thanks for the rundown of the subcircuit judgeships. I looked at this after reading your post and found that there are currently 154 sitting judges from the Subcircuits. Do you have a breakdown of which subcircuits currently have vacancies and which ones have not yet been given their full allotment? Do you know where this information would be available?
While Ashamed's math might be off, the point isn't. Three has 12 circuit judges. Most of the other subs (that currently have no vacancies) have 11 circuits or less. What is so special about the 3rd sub that they get an additional seat? Uh huh. Madigan, Sheahan and Burke -- that's what's so special. No waterboy Cunningham is brokering an equity deal? Right. By the way, Dan Malone is retiring -- there's your seat for 2022, Third Subcircuit.
Jack,
Don't be so naive. It's not personal, it's politics. If they increase the number of subcircuits across the county it will still dilute Evans' power twofold. First, he can't curry favor by appointing associates. Second, gains that he gets by judges out of certain subs (read: 1, 2, 5 and 7) will be substantially outweighed by losses he will suffer in others (3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 13 and 15). There are others that are a wash for him and his foes (6, 9, 11 and 14).
The Game of Robes is Afoot!
Daley Center is reopening to higher capacity. Lazy judges are beginning to turn in their papers. And the candidates are beginning to publicly hatch their plans.
And, here we sit. The practitioners and their clients being subject to the whims of the power players. I've been around long enough to see the Crook County standard morph into what it is now. New-ish players wanting their time to do exactly what the old dinosaurs did. No one in this game wants reform or better and qualified judges chosen either by the sitting judges/chief judge or the voters. It will continue as business as usual just different players. And, frankly a crop of much worse new judges in the last 15 or so years. For me, I dont care who is sitting on the bench making decisions in my cases. But I do care greatly that those judges be qualified, engaged, and have actual litigation experience. So, to those running the show, how about finding some hard working, experienced attorneys to bless so the litigants can have a fair day on court.
To further a point that Jack made...Party slating has a measurably larger influence on countywide contests than on subcircuit contests. So for that reason also, it seems odd that Toni Preckwinkle would support poaching countywide seats to hand to subcircuits.
Wait, what? Dan Malone is retiring? Game on in the Third Sub!
Perhaps the anti-Evans comments are triggered by his total lack of any desire to formulate a clear and coherent plan for continuity of trials in the Criminal and Law Divisions for the past 16 months. The Chief Judge is an administrator. But our chief judge Evans apparently limits his administrative skills to show up at bar functions to swear in the newest bar officers and offer empty platitudes. The man is a joke. And the pandemic showed that the emperor has no clothes.
You should be ashamed Irish Male of Beverly for your racist and misogynistic post.
Don't bite the bait, people. Don't bite the bait. Worry about your own contest.
One other thing that came to mind and might cast some light here: This representative has tried to alter the judicial system at least once before. In 2013 he introduced legislation that would have required every candidate for judicial election or retention to be approved by the ARDC as well as have ten years of active law practice in Illinois. It also would have raised the retention approval requirement to 67%. The legislation died in committee and it didn't appear to be part of any broader group's agenda.
@Anon 5/21 12:24 p.m. -- FWIW, I just received an email from an attorney insisting, rather vigorously I might add, that Judge Dan Malone is not retiring.
This provides me with an opportunity to point something out: No one -- and I mean no one -- should make plans based on anonymous comments here. That would be the height of folly.
I often flush comments claiming someone is retiring. Many of these are coupled with insinuations that the someone in question is going to be indicted in the next 15 minutes and/or has contracted a loathsome, wasting disease. Sometimes the flushed comments are less macabre and more in the category of mere wishful thinking. (I've often speculated that at least some of these are generated by persons who have just appeared in front of the judge and achieved a result that, in their view, left much to be desired.) It doesn't matter. Most of these "predictions" never come to pass.
Why, then, did I let this one in? I believe I thought, at the time, the passing reference to a possible retirement was incidental to the political point I thought Anon was trying to make. And I really am still curious as to how the 3rd Subcircuit appears to rate 12 judges. I'm sure I must have counted wrong, or the Illinois Courts website has, or has mistakenly put someone there that shouldn't be. Stuff happens.
But no one should gather, or assume, or project from my running a comment that I in any way vouch for its contents (unless I do an actual post about the information dropped in the comments, giving Anon due credit for a tip).
Post a Comment