The Million Dollar Question
The aftermath of last year's Illinois Supreme Court justice race left questions littering the air much like the confetti which clogged the streets of Chicago after the White Sox victory parade. Now it appears as though one big question has finally been answered. "Who was behind some of the 1 million dollars in so called mystery money which went into losing candidate democrat Gordon Maag's campaign?"
A group calling itself Justice for All Foundation disclosed its donors in order to settle a complaint brought by the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and it turns out the big money was given by the same plaintiff attorneys from Madison and St. Clair Counties who financially supported Maag openly. They included Randall Bono of East Alton, the SimmonsCooper law firm and attorney Steven Tillery of Belleville.
So, according to Cindi Canary of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, the "million dollar question" is "why these lawyers would have wanted their donations to Justice for All Foundation to be secret."
One theory is that this money was spent on some of the worst of the television and radio attack ads and no one wanted their fingerprints on them. But to be fair, the political reform people also have a complaint pending against the winning candidate, republican Lloyd Karmeier's supporters, the Illinois Coalition for Jobs, Growth and Prosperity.
For those of us in the southern part of the state who lived this campaign for months information like this and future Karmeier information is no real surprise. It is also no surprise that this is the race that will not die.
1 comments:
Of course it is the campaign that will not die. That's because the battle will soon shift to the election of the Republican Appellate and Circuit Court Judges that Justice Karmeier has appointed since joining the State Supreme Court.
It will be interesting to see how many of these judges are rejected by the voters in Southern Illinois next fall. You won't see the huge campaign warchests for each candidate like you saw in Karmeier's race in 2004 (a situation that was aggrivated in part by the complete absence of any significant race for big campaign donors to try to influnce). But I suspect there will be efforts to turn out a number of Karmeier's appointees.
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