Law Students

My Christmas Wish for Blago

By Dr. Bombay

The cesspool that is Chicago (and by extension Illinois) politics often leaves outsiders feeling a lot like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet: you just can?t believe how it all could have gone so very wrong. And yet, here we are again.

This week’s news that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was indicted on Federal charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, and solicitation of bribery related to his attempts to profit from his power under the Illinois Constitution to appoint Barack Obama?s successor is tragically not unique. Indeed, assuming he convicted (and after reading the indictment, I?d be astonished if he wasn?t) he?ll joins a bi-partisan kick-line that has gone from Springfield to the hoosegow. Just to review the bidding, Blagojevich?s immediate successor George Ryan is doing six and a half years for bribery and racketeering. Admittedly, you have to go back to Otto Kerner in 1968 to find the last Illinois governor convicted of bribery. He was caught, incidentally, when the woman who did the bribing deducted the value of the bribe (in the form of stock) from her Federal Income Tax. Chicago can make strange things seem perfectly normal.

In the mean time, you can roll around in a big pile of ward healers and assorted aldermanic sycophants whose attachment to the Daly machine has allowed them to go far further in politics than their talent or ambition would allow. Lots of them seem to get caught, but that never seems to stop another one from thinking he’ll be the guy who slips the noose.

And since they all wind up in the Federal poke eventually, you know who really wins? No one. Not the citizens who are deprived of good governance, certainly not people in need. Who wins? Those who would seek to discredit our system of government by dint of our failures. In this season of giving, I hope that a Federal jury gives Blagojevich a nice long time to think about how his actions and the actions of those like him do nothing but diminish us all.

Full post as published by Fight The Hypo on December 12, 2008 (boomark / email).