Illinois will never have fair maps for its legislative districts under the present Illinois Supreme Court. There is an opportunity in November to change the court, yet I fear the contest will not be engaging, even though it’s long past time for a change.
This is political inside baseball, so stick with me on this, if you’re interested.
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Illinois will never have fair maps for its legislative districts under the present Illinois Supreme Court. There is an opportunity in November to change the court, yet I fear the contest will not be engaging, even though it’s long past time for a change.
This is political inside baseball, so stick with me on this, if you’re interested.
In 1964, Democratic Governor Otto Kerner and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley made changes in the state judiciary that included a kind of gerrymandering, if you will. Previously, Illinois had seven Supreme Court justices from seven districts. The new structure called for the same seven justices, one each from four districts outside Cook County (Chicago), but with three justices elected countywide in Cook.
This latter proviso all but guaranteed there would be a Democratic majority on the court, as there has been continuously since 1964. Three Democrats are routinely elected from Cook County, always the ones endorsed by the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. In 1964 and forward, Democrats banked on a fourth Dem from the deep southern Illinois district, which was the case until a decade ago.
If Cook were divided into three one-justice districts, like the rest of the state, the outcome would likely have been two Democrats from Chicago districts and one GOPer from the county’s suburbs. And thus, the court might have bounced back and forth between Democratic and Republican 4-3 majorities, as one or more of the downstate districts is typically competitive on a partisan basis.
Over the decades, the Democratic court majority has been reliably protective of the interests of Cook County Democrats, rejecting efforts to create term limits, and rebuffing court challenges to heavily gerrymandered legislative districting.