(A) spokeswoman for Attorney General Lisa Madigan said the decision “has no direct impact” on the pension litigation.
“While this decision is very clear on the fact that the pension clause covers health care benefits, the arguments in the pension reform litigation are different than the ones in this healthcare case,” attorney general spokeswoman Maura Possley said in an email. “We will continue to vigorously defend the pension reform law.”
Supporters of the pension reduction law say those legal issues revolve around the question of whether the legislature essentially has emergency powers to modify the benefits in order to deal with a funding crisis and ensure the stability of the pension funds.
“This landmark law was urgently needed to resolve the state’s $100 billion pension crisis,” Quinn spokesman Grant Klinzman said in an email. “It was also urgently needed to ensure that teachers, university employees and state workers who have faithfully contributed to the pension system have retirement security.
“We’re confident the courts will uphold this critical law that stabilizes the state’s pension funds while squarely addressing the most pressing fiscal crisis of our time by eliminating the state’s unfunded pension debt.”
John Myers, an attorney who represents plaintiffs in both cases, said the attorney general’s office was “whistling past the graveyard.”
“A strong signal has been sent by the Supreme Court that is going to affect the outcome of that other case,” Myers said.
* 3:27 p.m. - From Kwame Raoul…
State Senator Kwame Raoul (D-Chicago 13th) issued the following statement on the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision in Kanerva v. Weems that a 2012 law altering state retirees’ health insurance benefits violated the Pensions Clause of the Illinois Constitution. Raoul chaired the conference committee that produced last year’s compromise pension reform law, which is now the subject of pending litigation, and negotiated a reform plan for City of Chicago retirement systems.
During the years-long debate over various pension reform proposals, I have consistently cautioned that we must align our actions with the constitution’s protections of state workers and their benefits. However, while we could examine previous decisions and discuss the legal precedents, there was no sure way to obtain guidance from the courts on this matter aside from passing a law and waiting for them to react.
Today, we begin to glimpse the nature of this reaction.
The Illinois Supreme Court has handed down a forceful decision, backed by six of its seven justices. Its powerful affirmation of the constitution’s protection of contractual rights and promised benefits may serve as a predictor of how this court will handle challenges to Senate Bill 1 and similar reform measures.
Today’s ruling did not speak directly to the “police powers” argument that in times of fiscal emergency, the state may be justified in taking extraordinary steps to balance its responsibilities and carry out its duties to all residents. But the court did clarify that in addition to protecting contractual rights, the Pensions Clause insulates public employees from the diminishment of their benefits by the General Assembly.
We must wait for the specifics of future opinions to firmly establish the parameters of a constitutional approach to meeting our obligations and setting our state on a firm financial footing. No matter what those specifics are, I remain committed to a long-term solution that improves our state and protects the rights of our valued public employees.
After many years of hard work, the Illinois General Assembly crafted and Governor Quinn signed a significant piece of pension reform legislation last December which protected our state from financial implosion, while also protecting the pension benefits of Illinois’ state and municipal employees.
Today’s state retiree health care ruling considered a different set of facts than that important legislation, and it is a fundamental premise of our legal system that a court cannot preemptively rule on a matter that is not yet before them.
Our state’s ability to continue providing crucial services, while securing public employee pensions, requires that the pension reform legislation take effect.
Not to be confused with The Civic Federation, which is led by Lawrence Msall. This is Ty Fahner’s group. The two entities are not affiliated with one another.
The Illinois Supreme Court ruled today that health care benefits for retired state and university employees are protected by the pension clause of the state constitution and cannot be diminished or impaired.
The Supreme Court ruled that a lower court was wrong to dismiss the four consolidated lawsuits (one supported by AFSCME, IFT, INA and FOP) which argued that SB 1313 was unconstitutional. That legislation had effectively allowed the state to diminish health care benefits for retirees by imposing new and higher health insurance premiums.
The Supreme Court sent the case back to the circuit court for further proceedings.
AFSCME is very pleased that the Supreme Court has agreed with us that affordable health care in retirement, a promise made to tens of thousands of Illinois public servants in exchange for their service, is protected by the constitution.
“The Supreme Court ruled today that men and women who work to provide essential public services — protecting children from abuse, keeping criminals locked up, caring for the most vulnerable and more — can count on the Illinois Constitution to mean what it says,” AFSCME Council 31 executive director Henry Bayer said. “Retirement security, including affordable health care and a modest pension, cannot be revoked by politicians.
“Unions representing public employees and retirees have stood virtually alone against political and corporate-funded attacks on retirement security,” Bayer added. “Time and again we have urged legislators to respect the constitution they are sworn to uphold, and to work together with us to develop fair and constitutional solutions to the state’s very real fiscal challenges. We remain ready to work in good faith with anyone to do so.”
Today, the Illinois Supreme Court made it very clear that the Pension Clause means what it says.
The Court cannot rewrite the Pension Clause to include restrictions and limitations that the drafters did not express and the citizens of Illinois did not approve.
The Clause was aimed at protecting the right of public employees and retirees to receive their promised benefits and insulate those benefits from diminishment or impairment by the General Assembly.
If the Court’s decision is predictive, the challenge of reforming our pension systems will remain.
As I have said from the beginning, I am committed to identifying solutions that adhere to the plain language of the constitution
* Take a moment and read between the lines of Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke’s dissent in the retiree health insurance case…
To reach its result, the majority must read into the pension protection clause language that is not there. Nowhere in the clause does it state that every benefit which “results from,” is “conditioned on,” “flows directly from” or “is attendant to” being a member of a pension system is provided constitutional protection. These phrases, which form the crux of the majority’s opinion, are simply crafted out of whole cloth. It is fundamental that the judiciary may not add language to a constitutional provision that was not approved by the voters of this state. To do so is to usurp the sovereign power of the people. The majority’s addition of language to the clause is error.
Moreover, by adding language to the pension protection clause, the majority fundamentally changes its meaning. The clause no longer protects the statutory benefits provided by a pension or retirement system. Instead, it provides constitutional protection to any statutory benefit—however unrelated to pensions—if the recipient of the benefit is a member of a pension system. And the majority provides no limit to this holding. Should the city of Springfield enact an ordinance which states that the members of the municipal pension system will receive an honorary plaque upon retirement, that benefit would “flow from” or be “conditioned on” membership in the system. The plaque, under the majority’s reasoning, would be a constitutionally protected contractual right that could not be diminished or impaired. I do not think this is what the drafters of the pension protection clause intended.
Unsurprisingly, nothing in the constitutional debate regarding the pension protection clause supports the majority’s reading of the provision. As the majority candidly acknowledges, the constitutional debate contains no references to health insurance premiums or other non-pension benefits for retirees. To the contrary, the unambiguous statements of the sponsoring delegates reflect that it was designed to protect a public retiree’s right to collect post retirement income in the form of an annuity and to ensure that the terms under which an employee acquired that right could not be altered to his or her detriment. […]
In sum, neither the plain language of the pension protection clause, the constitutional debate, our own case law, or case law from other jurisdictions supports the majority’s position. The pension protection clause protects pensions, not subsidized health care premiums.
Even though Justice Burke clearly disagrees with this particular ruling, it certainly appears that she agrees with the majority on the “clear” and “plain” language of the state Constitution’s pension protection clause.
The College of DuPage won’t receive a $20 million state construction grant now that Gov. Pat Quinn has seen an email detailing President Robert Breuder’s strategy to secure the long-promised funding for the Glen Ellyn school.
“The tactics used by the president in his email” convinced the governor not to release the $20 million the school hoped to use for a Teaching and Learning Center, a Quinn spokesman said Wednesday.
“We are suspending the possibility that they can submit a project for that funding,” David Blanchette said.
COD spokesman Joseph Moore said the school did not have a comment Wednesday evening but may have one Thursday.
In case you missed it the other day, the background on that notorious e-mail is here.
* Breuder told the Daily Herald his side of the story earlier this week…
Breuder said his May 9 email was part of an effort to get board members on the same page for the project.
Breuder said COD has known for at least a year it needs more classroom space. He said the school is operating at nearly 90 percent capacity during peak hours and needs to expand its facilities if enrollment continues to grow as projected.
“It’s an internal memorandum trying to work the politics inside my own board,” Breuder said of the email, which For the Good of Illinois obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Breuder said the original pledge for the grant dates to 2002, when then-Gov. George Ryan announced community colleges would get money to replace temporary buildings with permanent ones. COD never got its share, even though the state budgeted it in both 2004 and 2009, Breuder said.
The hope is Quinn will act to change that.
“All I know is he’s willing to go ahead and release money that’s been earmarked for us for a long time,” Breuder said.
it is clear that if something qualifies as a benefit of the enforceable contractual relationship resulting from membership in one of the State’s pension or retirement systems, it cannot be diminished or impaired. Thus, the question presented is whether a health insurance subsidy provided in retirement qualifies as a benefit of membership. […]
Giving the language of article XIII, section 5, its plain and ordinary meaning, all of these benefits, including subsidized health care, must be considered to be benefits of membership in a pension or retirement system of the State and, therefore, within that provision’s protections.
If they had intended to protect only core pension annuity benefits and to exclude the various other benefits state employees were and are entitled to receive as a result of membership in the State’s pensions systems, the drafters could have so specified. But they did not.
the drafters chose expansive language that goes beyond annuities and the terms of the Pension Code, defining the range of protected benefits broadly to encompass those attendant to membership in the State’s retirement systems. Then, as now, subsidized health care was one of those benefits. For us to hold that such benefits are not among the benefits of membership protected by the constitution would require us to construe article XIII, section 5, in a way that the plain language of the provision does not support. We may not rewrite the pension protection clause to include restrictions and limitations that the drafters did not express and the citizens of Illinois did not approve.
Because we find that this issue can be decided based on the plain language of the provision, “the debates can have little or no bearing or effect” with respect to how we construe that language.
Even if reference to the convention debates were appropriate, it would not aid the State’s position. […]
In light of the constitutional debates, we have concluded that the provision was aimed at protecting the right to receive the promised retirement benefits, not the adequacy of the funding to pay for them.
Emphasis added for obvious reasons. The new pension law sure appears dead to me.
For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the State’s provision of health insurance premium subsidies for retirees is a benefit of membership in a pension or retirement system within the meaning of article XIII, section 5, of the Illinois Constitution, and the General Assembly was precluded from diminishing or impairing that benefit for those employees, annuitants, and survivors whose rights were governed by the version of section 10 of the Group Insurance Act that was in effect prior to the enactment of Public Act 97-695. Accordingly, the circuit court erred in dismissing plaintiffs’ claims that Public Act 97-695 is void and unenforceable under article XIII, section 5.
Our holding that plaintiffs are entitled to proceed on their pension protection clause claims obviates the need to address the sufficiency of their remaining claims. Because plaintiffs have obtained all the relief that they seek, any comment on their other claims would be advisory and in conflict with traditional principles of judicial restraint. See In re Alfred H.H., 233 Ill. 2d 345, 351 (2009) (recognizing that Illinois courts generally do not consider issues where the outcome will not be affected, regardless of how those issues are decided).
The judgment of the circuit court of Sangamon County is reversed, and the cause is remanded for further proceedings.
That sound you hear is the state’s bond rating collapsing.
* The final nail in pension reform’s coffin…
Finally, we point out again a fundamental principle noted at the outset of our discussion. Under settled Illinois law, where there is any question as to legislative intent and the clarity of the language of a pension statute, it must be liberally construed in favor of the rights of the pensioner. This rule of construction applies with equal force to our interpretation of the pension protection provisions set forth in article XIII, section 5. Accordingly, to the extent that there may be any remaining doubt regarding the meaning or effect of those provisions, we are obliged to resolve that doubt in favor of the members of the State’s public retirement systems.
* This is going to be a very light day for me. I’m heading out of town soon, so we’ll have this post, the upcoming Illinois Supreme Court ruling shortly after 9, and then maybe one or two more.
This is from a very thoughtful Greg Hinz post that I think gets right to the heart of the real world problems with the Hobby Lobby case…
In his majority opinion, Justice Sam Alito argued that “closely held” private companies such as Hobby Lobby are close to a sole proprietorship in their mix of personal and business matters. “We do not hold, as the principal dissent alleges, that for-profit corporations and other commercial enterprises can opt out of any law,” he said. But Congress made it clear in a 1993 law that religious views of such a company will prevail when other means exist to protect those views — in this case, perhaps having the government or an insurance company pay for the contraceptives, rather than Hobby Lobby, Mr. Alito added. […]
In fact, [Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent], in what I found to be a truly insightful point, there is a huge difference between a sole proprietorship and an incorporated firm such as Hobby Lobby, which has 500 stores in 47 states.
“In a sole proprietorship, the business and its owner are one and the same,” she wrote. “But incorporating a business, however, an individual separates herself from the entity and escapes personal responsibility for the entity’s obligations. One might ask why the separation should hold only when it serves the interest of those who control the corporation.” […]
Hobby Lobby’s owners got something special from society when they incorporated: exemption from personal legal liability, preferred tax treatment, etc. But when it comes to paying the dues of setting up shop in the public square — following the public’s rules — they’re supposedly no longer a corporation?
Mr. Alito tacitly concedes the point. The Obama administration “would put these merchants to a difficult choice: either give up the right to seek judicial protection of their religious liberty or forgo the benefits, available to their competitors, of operating as corporations.”
* Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton) writing in the Chicago Tribune…
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, politician and lawyer. During the dictatorship of Gaius Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional republican government.
In Illinois, Cicero has become synonymous with the crime and corruption that permeate all levels of government. The symbolism is rich. In this state, the remarkable, the principled and the noble are defiled by our ruling class and the culture of corruption they perpetrate.
Last week, in a brazen display of power, House Speaker Michael Madigan and his lawyer Michael Kasper silenced the appeal of tens of thousands of Illinoisans of all political stripes who simply asked that voters have a say in the manner in which election maps in the state are drawn. […]
Fittingly, it was the philosopher Cicero who stated, “A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within … the traitor moves among those within the gates freely. … For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim … he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. …The traitor is the plague.”
Madigan has spent decades rigging the system, unchecked by members of the political establishment. These are Cicero’s traitors. They have so infected the political process in Illinois that the people are silenced via loopholes written into election laws by those in power so that they are able to maintain that power. The ruling class took an honest initiative of the people and through political gamesmanship ensured its demise. […]
To all the people who just had their names thrown out and voices silenced by Madigan and his supermajority of traitors, I say: Back a new initiative.
Discuss.
*** UPDATE *** With a hat tip to a commenter, Cicero never uttered that “traitors from within” line. It’s actually…
A paraphrase from a 1965 essay by Justice Millard Caldwell. The paraphrase appears to be from the Second Catiline Oration but drastically changes the rhetoric.
Oops.
And from another commenter, here’s an actual quote from Cicero…
He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.
* You may recall that the Quinn campaign’s first “Mr. Burns” ad was pulled down by YouTube this past March…
The ad quickly was blocked on YouTube this afternoon with a message that reads “This video contains content from FOX, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”
“All I can tell you is that FOX doesn’t authorize the use of Simpsons imagery in any political campaign,” said Scott Grogin, spokesman for Fox Networks Group.
The Rauner camp fired back tonight. “Gov. Quinn is running his campaign as poorly as he is running state government,” said Rauner campaign spokesman Mike Schrimpf.
We’ll see what happens with this one. I think it might even be the same ad because it has the exact same misspelled “courtetsy of Fox” tagline on it. I don’t recall ever seeing an e-mail promoting the video. I just went to the governor’s YouTube page and found it.
*** UPDATE *** Unsurprisingly, Fox has stepped in with another copyright complaint and YouTube has pulled Quinn’s video.
A 15-year-old boy was accidentally shot in the abdomen [yeserday] morning by his brother in a home near Harvard, authorities said.
The brothers found an unsecured .22 caliber rifle and were playing with it, thinking it was unloaded, according to a news release from the McHenry County Sheriff’s Department.
One juvenile pulled the trigger, shooting his brother in the abdomen, according to the release. The boy was listed in stable condition at Rockford Memorial Hospital, where he was undergoing surgery, the release said. […]
The brothers had been staying there with adults while their parents were out of town, authorities said. The parents of the juveniles have been notified.
A 13-year-old boy was in police custody [yesterday] afternoon for the shooting of three boys, ages 14 and 17, Monday in the Longwood Manor neighborhood on the Far South Side, authorities said.
The victims were standing on a street corner in the 9700 block of South Lowe Avenue when a group of people approached and someone opened fire around 6 p.m. Monday, Police News Affairs Officer Veejay Zala said.
One boy, 17, was shot in the head and armpit and taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in critical condition, Zala said. Another victim, 14, was taken in critical condition at Little Company of Mary Hospital with gunshot wounds to his chest and arm. Police said the third boy, also 14, was stable at Little Company of Mary with a wound to his right thigh.
13?
…Adding... On a somewhat related note, when Rep. Mike Zalewski introduced legislation earlier this year to increase mandatory penalties for some Chicago gun crimes, it appeared to be a slam dunk. But opposition from African-American and other lawmakers fed up with mandatory minimums stopped the bill dead in its tracks. There’s a growing trend of this push-back around the country, Illinois Public Radio reports…
“There’s an awful lot of information out there,” [Kathy Saltmarsh, head of the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council] says. “There’s been a pretty ongoing and robust national discussion about our overuse of incarceration, a growing awareness that many of those we incarcerate are there because of addiction or mental health issues. And when you’re imprisoned, the likelihood that you have will that addressed is really pretty small.”
That’s because even though the Department of Corrections consumes more than $1.2 billion dollars a year, its budget is stretched thin. State prisons are also crowded — at more than 150 percent of their rated capacity.
Those are among the factors that have driven sentencing changes across the country. That’s given the movement a perhaps surprising ally: conservatives. The Texas-based group Right on Crime has the support of big name Republicans like former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
Right on Crime’s Derek Cohen, a criminologist, says this requires a rethink of what prison is for.
“Prison is for the people we’re scared of, not the people we’re mad at,” Cohen says. “In other words, prison is for the people that need to be incapacitated while they receive rehabilitation or while they receive their punishment.”
Cohen says Right on Crime has found success in Republican-led states, and thus the group hasn’t been active in strongly Democratic Illinois. It seems the Republican reputation for being tough on crime gives them cover when it comes to a less politicized sentencing scheme.
“It’s almost a case of: it took Nixon to go to China, (and) it took Texas to say this needs to stop right now,” Cohen says.
That’s a really fascinating take.
[With apologies to IPR for going beyond Fair Use. But it’s an interesting and important story.]
*** UPDATE *** Comptroller candidate Sheila Simon is an IEA member, but the IEA wound up endorsing incumbent Republican Judy Baar Topinka.
[ *** End Of Update *** ]
* No surprise, considering its alternative. From a press release…
The Illinois Education Association (IEA), made up of 130,000 teachers, school support professionals and other education employees and retirees, says Quinn is the only candidate for governor who will fight for public schools statewide and work to make sure every student has the resources needed to succeed in school.
The unanimous decision by the IEA Board of Directors to support Gov. Quinn, a Democrat, over Republican challenger Bruce Rauner, came after a panel of IEA members interviewed both candidates.
IEA has supported candidates for governor from both major political parties in the past, recommending Republicans for the office of governor in five of the last nine elections.
In his bid for governor, Republican Bruce Rauner is announcing all sorts of new coalitions of late including Tuesday’s roll out of the Women for Rauner coalition that includes the wife of his top donor and the running mate of his main primary opponent.
Anne Dias Griffin, the founder and Managing Partner of Aragon Global Management, was listed among the women who are part of the Women for Rauner coalition. On Sunday, the campaign announced a Latino coalition anchored by Rauner running mate Evelyn Sanguinetti. Griffin’s husband, Ken Griffin, is Rauner’s biggest donor, having given more than $3.5 million in cash and in-kind contributions.
Also part of the women coalition is state Rep. Jil Tracy, R-Quincy, who ran against Rauner as Kirk Dillard’s running mate in a bitter primary battle.
Chuck Jefferson, a Democratic state representative from Rockford and the city’s only black state lawmaker, has resigned.
In a letter dated Tuesday, July 1, 2014, to Timothy Mapes, chief clerk of the state House, Jefferson said, “Please acknowledge this correspondence as official notice of my resignation from the office state representative of the 67th … District effective today.”
Jefferson, 69, was not immediately available for comment. His chief of staff, Litesa Wallace, confirmed that Jefferson had indeed stepped down. Asked if she is a candidate to replace him — her name is being mentioned by local Democrats — Wallace declined comment. She said Jefferson stepped down to “enjoy his retirement” and to spend more time with family.
A Winnebago County Democratic Central Committee panel made up of Chairman Charles Laskonis, Bill Crowley, also the Winnebago County auditor; and L.C. Wilson, a County Board member, will meet to name Jefferson’s replacement.
*** UPDATE *** Subscribers have known about this for over a week…
A northeastern Illinois lawmaker is announcing plans to remove himself from the November ballot.
State Rep. Josh Harms is a Watseka Republican and a longtime teacher at Watseka Community High School. He released a statement this week citing a desire to return to teaching and be closer to his family.
Harms was first elected to represent the 106th District in 2012.
* The Tribune explains how Bruce Rauner manages to pay such a low income tax rate…
Another lucrative source of equity firm revenue is management fees, essentially charges for the service of overseeing investments. Most equity firms levy a 2 percent annual charge on the assets they manage for clients, but Rauner has said the GTCR charge is 1.5 percent.
Service fees charged by most professionals, be they money managers or plumbers, are typically considered regular income and subject to taxation at the top of whatever tax bracket the individual qualifies for under the federal progressive tax system, tax experts said. In Rauner’s case, that was 35 percent through 2012.
At its core, the fee waiver strategy is an accounting maneuver that blurs the line between management fees charged by equity firms like GTCR to manage funds for investors and profits generated by the firms’ investments in the funds they manage.
In short, equity firms technically waive collecting on millions of dollars of management fees they are owed, but that hardly means they forgo the value of those fees. Instead, that gets reflected as a stake in the very investments they manage.
When the investment fund turns a profit, often within months, the equity firm receives the cash value of the waived fees and distributes that among its partners.
Doing so lowered his tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. The Tribune says the IRS is revisiting this loophole.
Complicated tax rules related to those business income losses freed Rauner from paying any Social Security or Medicare taxes in 2010 and 2011, despite his reporting healthy earnings in other income categories and listing a combined adjusted gross income for those years of about $55 million.
Uh-oh.
In 2010, Quinn whacked Bill Brady hard for not paying income taxes. This time it’ll be about Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Everything old is new again.
…Adding… A real stretch on the Twitters…
Trib rpts from 2010-2012 Rauner tax rate was >19%, Quinn tax rate was 18.8%; so Rauner paid higher tax rate than Quinn? #buryingthelede
Oh, please. Rauner made a gazillion times more than Quinn and his effective rate was two-tenths of a point higher and that’s burying the lede?
Pardon me while I LOL.
…Adding… From the Quinn campaign…
Following today’s front page Chicago Tribune report that Bruce Rauner “would not be releasing” his complete tax returns for the past three years, Quinn for Illinois Communications Director Brooke Anderson issued the below statement:
“Today we learned that Bruce Rauner again gamed the system to benefit himself while the rest of us play by a different set of rules.
“It took Chicago Tribune investigative reporters and a team of tax experts to unearth that Bruce Rauner, among the richest tax filers in America, has been using tax loopholes to avoid paying any Social Security tax and Medicare tax in 2010 and 2011.
“However, Rauner- who has not yet released any tax information from 2013 nor his complete return from previous years- told the Tribune he wouldn’t be releasing his complete tax returns to the public.
“Even Mitt Romney disclosed his complete tax returns to be transparent with voters.
“What is Bruce Rauner hiding?
“As a candidate for statewide office, Rauner has a duty to disclose his complete tax returns - including schedules -for the last three years, especially 2013.
“To not do so would be a total disservice to the people of Illinois.”
Today’s Tribune story reports that Rauner used elite tax strategies not available to everyday people to shield his wealth from paying his fair share in taxes. These particular tax strategies are under investigation by the IRS.
To date, Rauner hasn’t disclosed his complete tax returns for the last three years. In addition, he has not disclosed any tax information whatsoever for 2013.
* Former Gov. George Ryan, who is being released from home confinement today, talked to Michael Sneed. From the interview…
I don’t know if it’s a fact I learned a lot during the past six years, but I do know one thing for sure. You never know who are your real friends until you go through something like this.
“Now, I know who they really are . . . and for the most part it was a surprise.”
A former U.S. attorney and legal counsel to former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar has been named acting Illinois legislative inspector general.
The Legislative Ethics Commission announced in a statement received Tuesday that J. William Roberts of Springfield took over in an acting capacity on Tuesday.
In addition to his tenure as counsel to Edgar and U.S. attorney for the central district of Illinois, he also was Sangamon County State’s Attorney.
The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday is expected to decide whether a law requiring state retirees to start paying premiums for their health insurance is constitutional.
The anticipated ruling in Roger Kanerva et al., etc. v. Malcolm Weems, etc., et al. will not only resolve the constitutional question for thousands of retirees affected by the new law, but will likely provide court watchers and state leaders a glance into how the justices may react to a pension dispute expected to wind up before them in the near future.
At issue in Kanerva is Public Act 97-695, a law Gov. Patrick J. Quinn signed in 2012.
The law, which took effect July 1, 2013, requires retired Illinois employees, judges and university workers to pay premiums for their health insurance, something they previously didn’t have to do after serving the state for four to 20 years depending on their positions.
The Supreme Court in 2012 consolidated four suits brought over the law in the Sangamon County Circuit Court. The suits were filed in Madison, Sangamon and Randolph counties by several plaintiffs, including former Fifth District Appellate Court Justice Gordon Maag and members of the state retirement systems.
The putative class representatives bring various challenges to the 2012 amendments. All argue that the amendments violate the Pension Protection Clause of the Illinois constitution, which provides that “Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, and unit of local government or school district, or any agency thereof, shall be an enforceable contract relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.” Illinois Constitution, Article XIII, Section 5. Two plaintiffs argue that the law violates Article I, Section 16 of the state Constitution: “No . . . law impairing the obligations of contracts . . . shall be passed.” One alleges that the statute is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to the Director of CMS. One seeks an award of money damages, and three of the four seek to enjoin enforcement of the 2012 amendments.
The Sangamon County Circuit Court allowed defendants’ motions to dismiss all four complaints. With respect to the Pension Protection Clause, the court held that since health benefits are not actuarially predictable (in contrast to pension benefits, which are akin to an annuity), they are not analogous to pension benefits, and not covered by the clause. The Court rejected the challenges under the Contracts Impairment Clause, holding that since it was foreseeable that the terms and conditions of the group insurance plans would change yearly, no enforceable contractual rights were vested in retirees.
The court rejected the separation of powers challenge, holding that the statute had a clear legislative purpose, identified the persons covered, provided the means for the agency to meet the purpose of the statute, and appropriately limited the agency’s discretion. Finally, the Court dismissed the claims of one class plaintiff who sought damages, holding that such claims must be brought first in the state Court of Claims.
