Earlier this week, certain media outlets and blogs were positively atwitter about a comment made by Governor Rauner that called into question the, ahem, purity of the judicial system. The Governor stated the following:
Asked by the newspaper if he believes the state's high court is part of a "corrupt" system, Rauner said: "Yes, correct. Yes. Yes. We have a system where we elect our judges, and the trial lawyers who argue cases in front of those judges give campaign cash to those judges. It's a corrupt system."The Governor isn't suggesting that the justices are somehow individually corrupt or of poor moral character, only that a system where judges accept financial donations in order to fund campaigns to obtain their seats might have a less than ideal effect on the ability of a justice to be as impartial as possible. It's a fair point. And there's a strong argument to be made that justices should be appointed for life to best insulate them from politics.
Anyway, the point of this post isn't to address that particular issue. Rather, I wanted to contextualize the Governor's comments by considering why he may have opted to criticize the court this week. Some believe that his comments were intended to apply pressure to the Illinois Supreme Court as it deliberates over the fate of SB 1 (pension reform). If his comments don't succeed in nudging the court to find the pension reductions constitutional (and I don't believe that his comments would), then he can always fall back on the "see, I told you so" response if the court sides with the unions.
There was, however, another judicial development this week that may have contributed to the Governor's comments. We learned the following on Friday:
A judge has issued an order requiring Illinois government agencies to immediately reinstate mandatory union dues for nonmembers.
Friday’s order by St. Clair County Associate Judge Christopher Kolker requires the Rauner administration to “remit fair share fees . . . pending the resolution of the case” and to transmit “the correct payroll information” regarding gross pay for affected employees to Illinois’ comptroller. The order is based on an agreement between the administration and unions.Note the bolded sentence, which indicates that the order was not a surprise to the administration. The decision simply says that, while the legal battle over "fair share" works its way through the court system, the state won't withhold "fair share" dues.
I don't know enough about how this process works to be able to tell if the administration found it necessary to work something out with the unions ahead of a perceived unfavorable ruling on the matter, or if they really did have an incentive to do so. The following statement by the administration suggests it was the latter:
A spokesman for Rauner said the move was part of an agreement the administration struck with unions to give them access to the money in exchange for an expedited timeline to move the case along.
Again, I really don't know. I can see why the administration would want an expedited consideration of the broader "fair share" question. It is surprising that they would concede the restoration of the "fair share" collections after working so diligently to find a "workaround" to withhold the dues at the agency level when the plan to have the Comptroller withhold them fell through.
But I do wonder if the administration's foreknowledge that the court was going to temporarily reinstate the "fair share dues," pending an ultimate decision on the broader issue, contributed to the Governor's statement about the objectivity of the judiciary.
