Illinois legislators left Springfield late Wednesday without naming a new inspector general amid partisan squabbling over a replacement, leaving a key watchdog office vacant even as federal prosecutors continue their probe of corruption at the statehouse.
Legislative Inspector General Carol Pope was set to leave office at the close of business Thursday after announcing in July that she was stepping down. Pope resigned in protest over a government ethics overhaul lawmakers approved last spring that she said “demonstrated true ethics reform is not a priority.”
Lawmakers were slated to be at the Capitol for three days this week to kick off their spring session, but the schedule was cut to just one day — with next week’s scheduled days canceled as well — amid the worst surge in COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began nearly two years ago.
Pope originally intended to depart in mid-December, but she extended her tenure after a bipartisan panel appointed by the Democratic and Republican leaders of the state House and Senate deadlocked on nominating her replacement.
Republicans on the eight-member Legislative Ethics Commission say Democrats, who control both chambers of the legislature, have derailed the process by pushing for a candidate who wasn’t recommended by an outside search committee.
“In the past six months, Democrat lawmakers have done what they can to stymie the process and our progress,” Republican state Sen. Jil Tracy of Quincy, who chairs the ethics commission, said during a news conference Thursday.
The panel’s four Republican members are backing Joseph Hartzler, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and was recommended by the search committee.
Democrats favor another former federal prosecutor, David Risley, who also was director of public safety policy for former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner.
Risley, who has worked as an investigator under Pope, was not one of two candidate recommended by the search committee, but the ethics commission agreed to interview him after Hartzler and another recommended candidate failed to win the support of a majority of members, said state Rep. Maurice West, a Rockford Democrat who sits on the panel.
Another Democratic commission member, state Sen. Cristina Castro of Elgin, issued a statement accusing Tracy of politicizing “a process that was intentionally set up to try to keep politics out.”
“The fact is the ethics commission has been prepared to send names to the General Assembly, but Senator Tracy and other Republicans blocked those votes,” Castro said in a statement. “If not for those actions, we could have had a new inspector general in place.”
Republicans on the panel also have refused to do a second round of interviews with the two candidates, West said.
“I don’t know if we can resolve this collectively because it’s already been politicized by our chairwoman,” he said.
Advancing an inspector general candidate to the full legislature for approval would require a majority vote by the commission, meaning at least one member would have to vote with members of the other party.
Once a nomination is made to the House and Senate, a three-fifths majority vote is required for the candidate to be appointed. That means the supermajority Democrats could approve their preferred inspector general without any GOP votes.
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If the office becomes vacant, the commission is supposed to appoint an acting inspector general within 45 days. But that also would require bipartisan agreement. If the office is left unfilled for six months, the inspector general for the state auditor general’s office would take on the responsibility of investigating alleged misconduct by lawmakers and legislative staff.
In her final quarterly report for 2021, Pope said her office had received one complaint that it had not begun investigating due to her impending departure.
This won’t be the first time the legislature has gone without a watchdog.
After the state’s first legislative inspector general resigned in 2014, the position went unfilled until the vacancy was thrust into the spotlight when a victims’ rights advocate testified at a legislative hearing in October 2017 that her complaint alleging she’d been sexually harassed by a state senator went unanswered for more than a year.
The blowback led to the temporary appointment of former federal prosecutor Julie Porter, who held the position until Pope, a former state prosecutor and appellate judge, took over in March 2019.
All three people who’ve held the office have called for greater independence. In response, the ethics overhaul approved last year allows the inspector general to launch investigations without first getting approval from the ethics commission.
But the inspector general still has to get the commission’s permission to issue subpoenas or publicly release reports on lawmakers who are found to have engaged in misconduct. One of Pope’s major objections was that the new law also limits the scope of the office’s investigations to complaints that relate directly to lawmakers’ public duties.
