NW Illinois News

Unions poured millions of dollars into keeping Democrat Mike Madigan as House speaker, despite corruption charges against him.

Mailee Smith, an editorial analyst for Illinois Policy, a nonprofit think tank in Chicago and Springfield tasked with analyzing education, pension and state budget issues, issued that finding.

“They have too much invested in their financial partnership with Madigan to see him step down,” she wrote in the Illinois Policy op-ed.

Madigan, 78, is accused of influence peddling with Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the state’s largest electricity producer. Federal investigators allege ComEd officials from 2011 to 2019 provided political cronies of Madigan with jobs, contracts and payments in exchange for legislation favorable to the utility.

Though Madigan has not been charged with a crime, ComEd officials agreed to pay $200 million after admitting they tried to influence the House Speaker. The agreement is a three-year “deferred prosecution” deal in which, after paying the fine and cooperating with investigators, the charges against the utility would be dropped.

House Republicans and a few Democrats last month demanded that Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker call a special meeting to discuss reform. Though Pritzker conceded some reform is necessary, he declined the meeting, saying an Ethics Commission could take up the matter in November. Madigan, also the chair of the Democrat Party in Illinois, is the country’s longest-serving House speaker. 

Smith said unions have poured more than $10 million into campaign committees controlled by Madigan over the past 26 years. A third of that money she said, approximately $3.9 million, has come from teachers' unions, namely the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association and their political action committees (PACS). Smith said the teacher unions have foisted a myth that membership dues in the unions are not used for politics, but through separate donations to the PACS.

“That simply isn’t the case,” she said in the editorial. “In 2018 alone, the American Federation of Teachers – not its political action committee – gave $250,000 to Madigan’s personal election committee, according to records filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.”

Smith said teachers who don’t want to contribute to politicians can opt out of the unions and still receive benefits guaranteed from collective bargaining including salary raises, health and pension benefits, vacation pay, overtime, sick pay and seniority.     

Information on how teachers can leave a union may be accessed online.