(upbeat music) (camera lens beeping) (dramatic theme music beginning) - Welcome to "Capitol View", our weekly look at the happenings inside and outside the Illinois State Capitol.

I'm Jennifer Fuller.

Our guests this week are John Jackson, a visiting professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU Carbondale, and Hannah Meisel, the state house bureau chief for NPR Illinois.

Thank you both for joining us this week.

- Glad to be here.

- We need to start with perhaps happenings outside the Illinois state capitol, although they do impact the state capitol.

Now two Illinois state senators are charged with a number of offenses.

The one that we hear about this week is State Senator Emil Jones III charged with taking bribes from a red-light camera company.

And as we record this program, he's not yet had his arraignment in federal court, but John, how important is it to keep track of this?

And when is this going to end?

- Well, this is the worst of the old politics.

The old politics were centered on not only providing public service, but taking care of yourself and your family if you got into public service.

It's the classic urban machine forte that they took care of people, but they also took care of themselves.

This was what popularly called a fetcher bill, which what kept money for not only your campaign, but also maybe for you personally, the allegations are against the Senator.

Mayor Daley, Richard J. Daley, the head of the machine once said when he had a son in some problems with the bureaucracy and he helped his son out.

"If politic's not about sometimes helping your family and friends, then what can it be about?"

(chuckling) Well, that represents that mentality, but that era is really gone.

It's just, some people seem not to have gotten the memo yet.

I really think we're better than that, by and large, and certainly most office holders are honest public servants, but occasionally things come along and two, occasionally, in Illinois politics and most of it, but not all of it, Chicago politics.

So it is harmful to the public, to our trust in government.

It's also harmful right now to the Democratic Party because it plays into the theme that we're a corrupt state run by totally corrupt people.

I think that's certainly not the case, but it's the theme of the Republican's attack on the current administration, whether in Chicago City Hall or the governor's race or whatever.

So it is an effective public opinion tool for the Republicans to use.

- I wanna get to that point in just a moment, but Hannah, in terms of the news that comes out in reaction to this, we see that Senator Jones has resigned his leadership positions.

Governor JB Pritzker, this week, comes out and says that he needs to resign altogether as a lawmaker and he also includes Senator Michael Hastings who's accused of abusing women.

And we've not heard yet from either senator's office about their plans on that.

But how important is it, do you think, that the governor has come out and said that it needs to take this extra step?

- Well, I think it's pretty important.

I think, so if we rewind back to 2019, 2020, Governor Pritzker had to tread carefully or at least that's the political calculation he was making at the time.

When, for example, former Senator, the late Senator Marty Sandoval, his office was raided in September of 2019 and a string of other allegations, the drip, drip, drip of this widespread federal investigation just kept coming.

The governor made what a colleague of mine likes to call positive mouth noises about corruption, but he wasn't.

I think one of the criticisms of him, honestly, from obviously Republicans, but some of the anti-corruption Democrats, progressive, which I think we've learned that that's not the same thing, but is that he wasn't forceful enough.

And so when, in November of 2020, the associates of Mike Madigan were indicted, the comment for, the governor was still, he struggled with how to react to that.

And it's kind of interesting, I mean now, with the benefit of almost two years of history behind us, it's almost hard to imagine the position he was in because now it seems so obvious.

But at that point, Mike Madigan was still House speaker.

It wasn't 'til March of this year that he, himself, was indicted.

And so I think this is now with, he's the defacto leader of Illinois Democrats now that Madigan's gone, especially.

So yes, it's very important for him to be forceful, especially if he does, as we've discussed on the show before, have presidential ambitions.

He doesn't want any baggage if he's going to enter that fray in 2024.

And so, actually, we had heard back from, or a reporter has heard back from a representative of Mike Hastings who is refusing to give up his role.

And I guess I'm not really surprised by that.

Mike Hastings, by the way, he comes from a political family, his parents were involved in local government in the Southwest suburbs.

And of course, Emil Jones III is the son of former Illinois state president, Emil Jones, he was a mentor of former President Barack Obama when they both served together in the Illinois Senate.

So both of these guys, like John mentioned, they come from this kind of political tradition of take care of yourself and we've definitely seen it being stripped away from Springfield, but it's a long process.

It's arduous and it's painful for all involved and it's also embarrassing, especially in the case of Mike Hastings, all of his dirty laundry; he's going through a contentious divorce.

And Emil Jones, $5,000 is the price of the bribe that he allegedly accepted from a representative of SafeSpeed, the red-light camera company.

And that is, it's so little money.

It's almost, it's mind-blowing how little money that is, and the consequences thereof.

- John, I wanted to get back to the comments that you made and that Hannah has has added onto in terms of this is something that Illinoisans have almost gotten used to.

This is old politics in Illinois, the corruption kind of goes along with it.

GOP leader, House GOP leader, Jim Durkin, this week called the Illinois Democratic Party an "organized crime family" and said that this legacy of corruption just has to be stopped.

Is there a way to do this?

And what impact does this have on the new leadership in the Illinois Democratic Party?

- Well, it makes it more difficult to turn the page and they have been trying to turn the page, there's no question about that.

But the ultimate solution is for we, the people, to quit voting for these folks who are going to wind up being corrupt or who have any hint of this kind of problem in the past.

And we have got to ultimately be better than that in terms of citizenship and in terms of who the parties recruit to run for these offices.

I do think we have turned the corner on this as I indicated earlier.

The mayor of Chicago ran as a reformer and she ran essentially against the organization and she got elected.

Whether she gets reelected is still up in the air this time, but nevertheless, most of these problems have been taken care of.

And you would think that anybody who's tempted would realize the feds are watching.

It's amazing how much the federal government has kept an eye on Chicago.

So if you're not inclined to be honest by nature and by your own morality, from Rod Blagojevich on, it's clear that the federal government's been watching and no matter who is in the White House, the Department of Justice has come down often on Chicago politicians, especially.

So that should be fair warning.

- I wanted to move on to the criticism and the ongoing conversation about the Safety Act and the elimination of cash bail that's coming up.

That actually doesn't take effect until next year.

But Hannah, this has become really a big back and forth, particularly in the race for Illinois governor.

State Senator Darren Bailey, the GOP nominee, is accusing both Governor JB Pritzker, and Chicago's mayor of already being soft on crime.

And now they're attacking the Safety Act, which they say will cause even more damage and cause the streets to be less safe and other accusations.

What are you finding in terms of the reporting on this act and the reporting of the accusations?

Is there a lot of misinformation there?

- Yeah, I mean, let me first say, I think that the media and I include myself in that, I include our colleagues who otherwise are well-intentioned.

I just, from start to finish, I don't think that we've done a good job.

I think that the, I think that the way that this was talked about in two falls ago, in the late summer and fall heading into winter of 2020, when the legislative black caucus, they wanted to capture the energy of the summer of 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and all of this energy for racial justice.

And so they had put together this plan that these four legislative pillars that they wanted to see passed, and they got them passed and mostly in the lame duck session in early 2021.

And of course, this criminal justice piece, which we call it a Safety Act, that was one of the, that's the pillar that has garnered the most attention.

But you could see the problems in communicating this from the beginning, even before the law was passed.

For example, in that fall of 2020, legislative black caucus had endless Zoom hearings and it was by the dozens.

And I think at a certain point, people just stopped tuning in and they tuned out the whole thing, because I mean, listen, it it's easy, I understand it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback with this, especially with the hindsight of two years.

But even then, I feel like people were like let's just have some big, long hearings about these issues so more people can actually feasibly tune in with their lives and their schedules and maybe start a public information campaign then.

Maybe put some money into a website and put some money into selling this to the public.

I think one of the big issues that Democrats have, Democrats who are in charge of Springfield, is they have the benefit of being in charge of everything, right, and they have for some time with the exception of Bruce Rauner in recent years.

And they are so concerned when they're debating laws and passing things, they're concerned with pleasing minorities of their constituencies, which I mean to say is like if the ACLU has a small problem with this part of the law and then this interest group has a small problem, they'll spend a lot of time trying to work those out, but they don't think enough, I think, about trying to sell things to the public.

And so there was a time, I call it six to eight weeks after Governor Pritzker actually signed this into law in February of 2021 that Democrats could have gotten organized and put together a public information campaign.

Because even when it was being passed, we could see the seeds of what Republicans were going to try to argue against this.

And it's grown.

And the amounts of misinformation, disinformation that are out there now that's famous.

I wanna say it's a Mark Twain quote that the truth is still putting its pants on while the lie runs out the door or something like that because it's really, really hard to combat lies once they're already out there and they've been out there and they've been marinating and evolving to the point where people don't know where they got them anymore because it's like a game of telephone.

And so, I think that Democrats have just, but I also wanna say, of course, it's not just the media's fault, it's not just Democrat's fault.

There's a lot of bad faith actors who have made up lies out of whole cloth.

And they share the blame here, too, but the whole thing is a mess.

And, of course, politics is never easy, politics is always messy, but in my mind, I think a lot could have actually been prevented if people had been more strategic about selling this to the public and actually putting money behind it.

And God knows JB Pritzker could have spent a lot of money on selling this to the public last year or earlier this year.

And now we are what, seven weeks out from the election?

And it's a mess.

- John, lies are nothing new in politics, in political campaigns.

You've been a student of politics for your entire career.

How does this differ?

This climate that we're in now where people can say things they know to be untrue and just watch them take root and grow from there?

How does this compare to what we would've seen 10 or even 20 years ago?

- Well, that's a good point.

And Hannah made a good point about this, too.

This is a complex bill and it got put together pretty rapidly.

It's not at all unusual for a complex piece of legislation like this to need some cleaning up.

And it happens, it's called a trailer bill.

Those trailer bills take wording problems and ambiguities and they fix it later.

Now, Democrats probably should have fixed it earlier, but what's unusual about this situation is one of the major parties, the Republicans, have made crime an absolute essential part of their campaign, probably the number one charge that they're making against the administration and this fits beautifully into that narrative.

So what's unusual about this is how effectively the Republicans have been able to latch onto this.

It's hard to explain.

Kwame Roe, for example, has admitted that they need to go back and clean up some of this.

It's hard to understand that, explain it to the public in such a way they will relate to it.

And so I think the Republicans have been very effective in melding this bill into that larger narrative.

Now, we'll say in defense of the media, I saw an excellent analysis in the Rockford newspaper last week about what are the truths and what are the non-truths and what are the ambiguous language points that need to be cleaned up?

That's the kind of thing that the media can do, particularly the print media, can do very effectively.

I thought that was an excellent example of saying, look, a lot of these claims are just outrageous distortions of what's going on or it's taking the worst case and then making that into what the norm would be.

Like turning all the prisoners to loose on January the 1st kinds of things.

And they've been aided and abetted, particularly in Downstate by a number of states' attorneys, a number of sheriffs.

We've had multiple interviews with sheriffs and state's attorneys or former state's attorneys in this end of the state.

And people see that well, yeah, I know that guy, I trust him.

If he says it's terrible, it's terrible.

So Democrats have got to try to get ahead of this, but the Republicans are using it very effectively at this point.

- Sure.

One of the other issues that's bound to become a larger issue in this upcoming election would be the busing of asylum seekers from states like Texas and Florida into states and communities that have said that they would be welcome to asylum seekers if those people were to end up in their communities.

Well, Governor Abbott in Texas, Governor DeSantis in Florida are kind of taking those states and cities up on that offer.

We're seeing hundreds of asylum seekers being bused into cities like Chicago.

We saw it last week in Martha's Vineyard and other places on the East Coast, but now the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois are looking at how can we serve these people when they do arrive here?

It's becoming a bit of a crisis there to the point where some other communities across the state are being asked, hey, how can you help if we would need to perhaps take some of these asylum seekers and send them into your community for assistance?

How much, Hannah, are voters paying attention to this and what impact is it having on the state?

- I think that it's not been, I don't think it's broken through to the level of say Roe V. Wade being overturned, has changed the tenor of this election season, at least not yet.

I think at this moment, we're recording on Thursday morning.

The latest number I saw was about 750 asylum seekers, primarily from Venezuela, but also from Central America where we've seen the most number of migrants in the last decade or so have come to Chicago through these busing programs.

And big cities like Chicago, like New York, they can absorb these folks because there is already the infrastructure.

It's when folks are being dropped off in smaller places that don't have the infrastructure, that's when those communities have an issue.

And then, of course, depending on the demographics of the community, there might be a huge backlash because of course.

But last week, I believe it was, or maybe it was the week before, the governor had, I guess, coordinated a drop off of some of these folks in a hotel in suburbs.

And the mayor there was pretty angry about not having communication about that prior to.

And so, it's really complicated, especially when you.

It's like for Republicans, I think people from Venezuela, especially, that's an interesting kind of look because if you recall back a few, several years ago, when the crisis in Venezuela really started ramping up, you had Republicans who said, well, this is what happens in a communist government.

And they were kind of the new, kind of migrant group that was being used as poster children by Republicans.

But now they're being used in a more, I guess you could say, sadistic way.

I mean, there's also a question of whether this is human trafficking.

But to get back to your main question, Jen, I mean, are voters paying attention?

Yes.

I think that the narrative, at least in most voters' minds, it's more clear on what Governor DeSantis and what Greg Abbott are doing rather than those who are receiving these folks.

Now if there is an incident, God forbid, that happens involving these migrants, and Republicans are able to spin that up into their whole narrative of crime going crazy, then we could see an issue, but I mean, I hope that doesn't happen.

I hope that these folks are safe because imagine arriving in a country and then being, in some cases fooled into getting on a bus, getting on a plane, and then being dropped off in yet another strange place where you have to start all over again.

It is very overwhelming and people should not be used as political pawns.

It's gross, but this is where we are.

- John, Hannah touches on this.

It's not a state issue.

In many cases, it's not even a national issue, it's an international issue that we're seeing people show up here in the United States seeking asylum.

But the way that the immigration system is set up in the United States, it takes too long for them to work their way through the system and either be granted asylum or sent back to where they came from.

I know that the governor has asked for federal help, but how much does the Biden administration need to take part in this and really help those states where these asylum seekers are showing up?

- Well, they've got to get out ahead of it and they seem to have been behind it too much, too long.

This is a long-standing problem and the immigration law, basic law that we live under is from Ronald Reagan and his advocacy in 1981.

So we've had this law in place and it's inadequate.

The Congress should have acted years ago.

There was a very good effort by John Boehner, the Republican leader of the House at the time, working with Obama and Biden in 2013.

They got a bill worked out that Boehner signed off on.

That bill would've taken care of a good number of these kinds of problems.

But when Boehner carried it back to the Republican caucus, they bopped on it and Boehner couldn't sell it to the Republican caucus even though it had already passed the Senate at that point.

This has been on the agenda ever since then.

Biden administration inherited it, but they've not gotten ahead of it.

And Homeland Security ought to be dealing with these mayors more adeptly than they are.

They ought not be reporting as the mayor of Washington DC, for example, was saying she needed to hear from the feds and the feds need to help on this.

They've gotta get ahead of it.

And at this point, they've not been adept at doing so.

- John, just a minute or so left.

I know there were several endorsements that have come out over the last week or so for statewide candidates and other candidates in Illinois.

Any of those surprising to you?

- Well, I'm not sure endorsements make a whole lot of difference anymore, because particularly newspaper endorsements really don't have the kind of sway they used to have and only the public opinion leaders and people who are really on top of politics pay much attention to them.

I think they are worth getting in that you can use them in your ads, you get some free coverage for one day.

The one that was surprising to me was I saw some brief mention of 150 Republican notables had endorsed Governor Pritzker.

And that would indicate some unhappiness in the party establishment.

And that one's the one that stood out for me.

- A lot of conversation that we can have on that over the next several weeks as we lead up to the November election.

John Jackson, Hannah Meisel, thank you so much for your time this week.

- Thank you.

- For having us.

- You've been watching "Capitol View" on WSIU.

You can find us online at wsiu.org and at our YouTube channel, WSIUTV.

I'm Jennifer Fuller.

We'll catch you next time.

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