The Springfield Animal Farm

Under the heading of “If you don’t like the rules, change them” comes a new law which the State Board of Elections identifies as “sponsoring entity.”

Before, if at any person or entity contributed at least one-third of total funding of a political committee, that contributor had to be listed as a sponsoring entity of that committee.

Now, there are three exceptions:
· An established political party,
· A partisan caucus of either house of the Illinois General Assembly, and,
· The Speaker/President or Minority Leader in the Illinois House/Senate

This would allow, for example, a Downstate Democrat who was strongly funded by one of campaign funds controlled by Speaker Mike Madigan to avoid revealing that fact in the title of his/her campaign committee.

The law joins the special right to conceal staff time sheets, which the Leadership previously granted to itself.

Both are right out of “Animal Farm,” in which some animals are more equal than others.

But, as Lynn Sweet, Washington correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, stressed in one of her columns, “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” (Translated from a small billboard near the Amsterdam train station, which she photographed.) She said that she “did it to remind myself of the power of the people I cover—mostly government and political officials—and of the power I have as a journalist.”

From McHenry County Blog