Snyder v. United States.

Meets Illinois politics.

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In May, we described the federal bribery and racketeering case against Michael J. Madigan, for decades the most powerful figure in Illinois politics. Among other things, he was Speaker of the Illinois House for 36 years, with near-absolute control over which bills came up for a vote, and which would become law. Budget bills, pension bills, tax bills, you name it. 

Illinois’s finances have improved quite a bit with the arrival of billions in Covid money from Washington, but that money will dry up soon and the state still has a $146 billion black hole in its balance sheet. That’s the state’s unfunded pension promises. They’ll definitely outlast the Covid money, which has to be earmarked by the end of this year. Add in the health care promised to retired state workers, and it works out to $39,757 for every taxpayer in Illinois, according to the watchdog group Truth in Accounting. Only Connecticut and New Jersey are worse. 

There’s plenty of blame to go around for Illinois’s never-ending fiscal woe, but a lot of it belongs to Madigan. Under his leadership, lawmakers enabled risky pension maneuvers that would have been illegal if a company had tried them. When you control the statehouse, you can make illegal acts legal, at least as far as the statutes are concerned. The cold, hard laws of economics are another matter. 

Madigan’s trial was supposed to start last April, in the wake of the related trial of four people convicted last year of bribing him. The so-called ComEd Four were former executives or lobbyists for Commonwealth Edison, Chicago’s electric utility. Their jury found that they had schemed for nearly a decade to do Madigan’s bidding, in exchange for his getting legislation favorable to ComEd enacted. (Too bad about the ratepayers.) The ComEd Four were initially set to be sentenced in January.

But both Madigan’s trial, and the ComEd Four’s sentencing, were delayed while the U.S. Supreme Court decided a much smaller-bore graft case, Snyder v. United States. Its decision late in June “dropped a nuclear bomb on the ComEd case,” said former Illinois federal prosecutor Christopher Hotaling, now a partner in the white-collar defense practice of Nixon Peabody, in an interview with Law360. 

“It just really bombed the whole thing and left a pretty big crater,” said Hotaling, who prosecuted federal cases in Illinois for 16 years. 

The same day the Supreme Court issued its decision in Snyder, lawyers for the ComEd four called for new trials. The “crime” the four had been convicted of wasn’t a crime after all, they said. Madigan has not yet commented. But a member of the defense team for his case said he would argue, among other things, that the grand jury had indicted Madigan under an “incorrect” law.

This isn’t what the average Illinoisan was hoping for, if a recent poll is any indication. Commissioned by former Illinois governor Patrick Quinn, it showed people are furious about corruption in Springfield and crying out for reform. Eighty percent said they wanted binding ethics reform added to the state constitution. Even more — 90 percent of Democrats and 93 percent of Republicans — supported legislation to suspend pension payments to any retired legislators who were indicted on corruption charges. Madigan has received monthly pension payments totaling a little more than $300,000 since he was indicted in March 2022. 

Many Illinoisans saw Madigan’s trial as a possible starting point for state ethics reform, but the Snyder decision has been a setback.

The decision revolved around Section 666 of the federal criminal code, which criminalizes theft, fraud, and bribery involving federal funds disbursed to states, local governments, and other entities. Six of the justices held that federal prosecutors have been wielding Section 666 too broadly, and they narrowed it. The decision was in keeping with other recent decisions that reduced federal powers to regulate business, interpret laws, and throw the book at presidents who engage in wrongdoing.