•December 19, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The Illinois Supreme Court has repeatedly thwarted citizen efforts to vote on term limits and redistricting reform, and has dismissed, without even a hearing on the merits, a proposal to address the public employee pension mess that is strangling the state budget.
This past week, the state high court approved an outrageous violation of taxpayer-funded pension programs by awarding huge pensions to non-government union officials who put in a single day on a government payroll. How shameful this practice.
I say if the court won’t change its ways, change the court. Read on, though the next several paragraphs might be a slog.
The framers of the Illinois Constitution of 1970 provided that voters could initiate and amend the legislative article of the charter. “Structural and procedural” amendments would be allowed. In 1976, the court held that this term requires amendments be both structural and procedural. This makes it almost impossible to craft a proposal to make a single change in the legislative article that is both.
The late, eminent state Supreme Court justice Walter Schaefer pooh-poohed this court reading. “When I see that a restaurant serves both chicken and beef, that doesn’t mean every dish has to have both chicken and beef in it!”     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.