Changing governors isn’t as simple as calling the movers. For good or ill, departing residents of the Executive Mansion always leave something behind.
Pundits will debate the relative pluses and minuses of George Ryan’s four-year tenure as Illinois’ chief executive — and there is an impressive trunkful of stuff to rifle through. Historians will assess the legacy of this endlessly complex politician. Even philosophers might weigh in on the stunning personal transformation of this confounding and complicated man.
But here’s what most Illinoisans already know: When he moved back home to Kankakee, former Gov. George Ryan left us with a few items we’ll need to dispose of. Among them, a state budget that is running in the red, a challenge to our capital punishment system that is getting international attention and a continuing series of political corruption indictments, some of which read like scripts from B-movies.
• First things first. On Ryan’s watch, the state has gone from a $1 billion cash balance to a budget hole that threatens to reach $5 billion.
In this issue, business writer Maura Webber and Statehouse bureau chief Aaron Chambers address the budget crisis and the sour state of the national economy (see pages 6, 14 and 19).
It is true that Ryan, along with many other governors, faced a revenue-withering recession over the past year. Still, it’s useful to put his management style into historical perspective.
Jim Edgar, the governor who left Ryan that $1 billion welcome gift, faced a $1 billion debt when he moved into the mansion 12 years ago. And he, too, suffered a recession, one that hit Illinois months into his first year as governor. The ever-cautious Edgar, who wasn’t a wheeler-dealer by nature, managed to tick off a lot of people with his repeated use of the word “no.” Yet when he packed up after eight years in the governor’s mansion, the state’s ledger was well into the black.
Charlie Wheeler talked with Edgar’s budget chief Joan Walters about the challenges that administration faced, and some of the options it considered (see page 29). The short of it? Edgar managed to dig in and dig out.
Ryan, on the other hand, continued to operate under the old-school rule of politics that getting things done means giving nearly everyone a chance to dig in and make out, leaving taxpayers to pay the freight.
Consider just one example: Illinois First. There’s no question the state needed to rebuild its crumbling roads and bridges. There’s no question Ryan pulled off an amazing feat by getting his $12 billion program through the legislature. And there’s no question he showed considerable moxie by negotiating increases in license plate fees and liquor taxes to help cover the cost of the program. The annual registration fee went up by $30 a plate, which, no surprise, was not a popular thing to do.
Ryan stuck to type, though, by rolling one-too-many logs to achieve his ends. He agreed to allow lawmakers to create their own petty cash fund totaling some $1.5 billion over five years. Northwestern University political scientists Michael Herron and Brett Theodos take another look at this so-called member initiative program, an all-but-off-the-books budget process that enables legislators to use state dollars on such “infrastructure” needs as tutus for a community performing arts center and a special mower to take care of local drainage ditches (see page 22).
• George Ryan’s Amazing Grace conversion on the death penalty should continue to fascinate armchair psychologists in the decades to come. But he left his contemporaries with a difficult social and political challenge: fix a system that has condemned the innocent. And he laid bare deep divisions on the fairness, if not the morality, of capital punishment.
Two days before leaving office, Ryan cleared this state’s Death Row. It was the most sweeping exercise of executive clemency in the nation’s history; only the U.S. Supreme Court commuted more death sentences when, in 1972, it swept away the states’ capital statutes.
As Bethany Warner reports from our Statehouse bureau (see page 9), Ryan commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole 164 condemned inmates.
Ryan’s three-year struggle with his conscience, which is without parallel among Illinois politicians in the modern era, began when he faced sending a man to his death. He decided to sign off on the execution of Andrew Kokoraleis, but felt compelled to issue a lengthy press release explaining in anguished detail why.
After a parade of innocent men walked off Death Row, Ryan instituted a moratorium on executions and formed a commission to study the capital process. That panel issued 85 recommendations for improving a system Ryan called “broken.” Among the suggestions: reduce the types of murder that qualify for a death sentence, videotape interrogations and authorize judges to change sentences to natural life if they disagree with a jury’s decision for death.
Policy-makers could address these and other procedural matters. But in a dramatic 11th-hour speech, Ryan called for more. In explaining his decision to commute all death sentences, irrespective of guilt or innocence, Ryan called Illinois’ capital system arbitrary and unfair. Decisions to seek or impose sentences of death, he said, are affected by geography, race and wealth.
The blanket commutation, and Ryan’s earlier comment that he would abolish the death penalty if he could, set off a trip wire at the center of this issue. Among the responses gathered by The Associated Press on the day of the commutations are two that define the parameters of the debate.
“He’s right, absolutely right,” said former Illinois Supreme Court Justice Seymour Simon. “He’s not only right, he made a very compelling case for what he’s doing, the most compelling case I’ve ever heard anyone make.” But John Schmidt, Sangamon County’s state’s attorney, told the AP, “I’m outraged. Justice has not been done, and the victims certainly have not been given justice.”
• Is Illinois ready for reform yet? To crib from the late Chicago Alderman Paddy Bauler, maybe it ain’t.
Good-government types thought the political system had come a long way from the days when supplicants pressed cash into officeholders’ hands. But the past four years have offered a powerful lesson on the return of the repressed. Now this state’s “culture of corruption” is actually a defense strategy in the trial of Scott Fawell, Ryan’s top aide while the former governor was secretary of state. We’re getting a good look at how, under Ryan’s watch in his previous post, state employees did political work on the taxpayers’ dime and how documents were destroyed to hide the fact.
But the jaded ought to sit up and take notice of the trial that’s coming up. Prosecutors allege that Larry Warner, an associate of Ryan’s, shook down secretary of state vendors for what amounts to protection money. The indictment, which makes for fascinating if disheartening reading, charges that Warner pressured vendors to kick back cash to keep their contracts. Over time, Warner ratcheted up the payments by thousands of dollars. And during that time, he wasn’t an employee of the state. Even in Illinois, we expect our political scoundrels to at least be appointed or elected.
But what takes this ever-widening scandal into uncharted territory is that people died for others’ personal and political gain. Dozens have been convicted for selling licenses to unqual-ified truckers and turning the cash over to Ryan’s campaign fund. In this issue, we detail loopholes that made the scam possible. Reporter John Kelly outlines the policy issues on page 24.
Revelations throughout Ryan’s tenure as governor about this level of corruption has left a load of cynicism that will be hard to remove.
The last chapter on this governor has yet to be written. But the disposition of these items could determine his legacy.
Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, February, 2003
