From Jeanne Ives:
He’s Going to Jail Today
Today, October 13th, is the deadline for Mr. Speaker – the name he coveted – to report to federal prison.
He’s looking at 7.5 years behind bars.
At age 83, it’s possible Mike Madigan dies in jail.
For a guy accustomed to calling the shots and having adoring kleptocratic union-thugs and grifters do whatever he asked, this experience will be uncomfortable.
But it won’t be nearly as uncomfortable as what Illinoisans have endured during his 50 years in the Illinois House and 37 years as the Speaker.
He and his cronies turned Illinois – a state that should be one of the most prosperous in the country – into a financial wreck.
Under Madigan, Illinois became a state with the worst credit rating, and today it still has the worst credit rating of any state.
He left behind piles of debt at the state and local level, including the worst pension debt.
And to pay for it all, he set up a system that has imposed the highest state and local tax burden on taxpayers, including the highest property taxes.
Those high property taxes supplied a customer base for his bread-and-butter property tax appeal business.
He could have used his power for good.
Instead, in addition to turning the state over to rapacious public sector unions, he created a cast of radical identitarian socialists that learned power politics from him and have now taken it to a new level.
Near the end of his time in office, his previous, more moderate positions on social and cultural issues were left to the wayside.
To keep the progressives at bay and to go along with the cultural zeitgeist, Madigan, that “good Catholic”, capitulated on everything.
And let’s be clear.
Madigan controlled everything for the last 20 years he was in office. If he didn’t have super-majorities, then he had control of the House and a Democrat governor in office, or a super-majority of Democrats in the Senate, like in the Rauner years.
During those last 20 years, Madigan allowed
- taxpayer-funded abortion,
- transgender birth certificates, and
- the most radical abortion bill in the land, which was passed in 2019.
That’s the same year Pritzker and Madigan doubled the gas tax and began to increase state budgets massively.
By 2020, with the writing on the wall,
Madigan knew his time was up.
He completely caved to the extremists and turned over control to the progressives.
To be sure, Madigan goes to prison in disgrace.
He never thought he would be caught.
As he reports to club fed, there’s no man, myth, legend here.
He goes to jail a crook, but for inconsequential crimes compared to the damage he did to the people he promised to serve and the oath he swore to uphold.
His speakership is a black mark in Illinois politics and on the Democrat party.
He owned them all, and they all paid homage to him.
As for why he was allowed to reign for as long as he did, there is plenty of blame to go around, but it primarily rests on the voters.
