Aurora Beacon News
April 24, 2007
EDITORIAL
Ethics bill still waiting for vote
It will be one year tomorrow since the Illinois House unanimously passed an ethics-reform bill that targets pay-to-play politics. And despite most of the state's senators signing on as co-sponsors, the legislation has yet to be called for a vote in the Senate.
That's because Senate President Emil Jones won't let House Bill 1 make it to the floor. Like other important pieces of legislation -- the recall bill recently passed by the House also comes to mind -- he apparently would prefer some proposals die a slow death in committee.
Sen. Chris Lauzen, R-Aurora, signed on as a co-sponsor in May 2007 to the bill that would ban businesses and individuals who hold big state contracts from donating to the campaigns of the officeholders who award the contracts. Lauzen points out that the 47 co-sponsors in the Senate represent most of Illinois' 12.5 million residents. "That is shameful," he said. "The will of one person ... frustrates the 10 million."
The Tony Rezko corruption trial should give new urgency to ethics-reform legislation, but Jones appears to be once again protecting his own interests and those of Gov. Blagojevich by bottling up this legislation.
Sen. Linda Holmes, D-Aurora, is one of only a dozen senators not listed as a co-sponsor of the House bill -- which she called an "oversight" that will be corrected -- although she was added last week as a co-sponsor to the Senate version that doesn't seem to go quite as far. She thinks the second bill has a better chance of passing both chambers -- she said the House version was "a great way to start negotiations." The problem is that competing versions of the bill could mean nothing gets passed.
We're not sure why a bill that has the support of 116 House members and most of the Senate needed to be "improved" in the first place -- that has been Jones' stated reason for the holdup -- and why the relatively minor changes have taken so long. Unless, of course, he doesn't want ethics reform at all.
Holmes relies heavily on Jones' Illinois Senate Democratic Fund for campaign funding -- $547,000 during her first election in 2006 -- but she said she has not been pressured to support his initiatives as a result. But Senate Democrats have allowed the too-powerful Jones to bog down the democratic process; it's time to stand up to him and insist that meaningful ethics-reform legislation gets passed.
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