Jury selection on the corruption trial of long-time Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan continues to day. They need one more juror and several alternates. The challenge is finding people who a) don’t know anything about the case or b) are willing to lie about what they know and say they haven’t formed an opinion.
Mr. Madigan was the longest-serving speaker of a state legislature—any state legislature—in U. S. history. He was speaker from 1983 on (with a small gap when the Republicans held the Illinois legislature for two years) and was chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party for 23 years. It is simply not credible than anyone in his district, anyone in the Illinois Democratic Party leadership, or anyone in the national Democratic Party leadership did not know about his corruption. That includes Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi. They all knew. They just didn’t give a damn as long as he kept delivering votes.
Mr. Madigan presided over the decline of the State of Illinois which is ongoing and the decline was due in large part to the policies he championed. Those included not just reckless spending and taxation but extended to not paying into public employees retirement funds over lengthy periods of time.
