Last year’s state budget talks were dragged into the bitter fight between the Senate and the House and the governor’s office over a massive bill to regulate carbon-based power plants. As a result, the House hurriedly and angrily jammed an appropriations bill over to the Senate before it could be fully checked for accuracy. Both chambers had to return during the summer to fix the mistakes.

After the Illinois House and Senate voted to pass legislation to partially pay down the state’s unemployment insurance trust-fund debt, top Democratic leaders gathered for a Statehouse press conference to boast about their accomplishment.

For decades, House Speaker Michael Madigan and everyone around him insisted that the man was always very scrupulous and extremely careful about not only the language that he used, but the language he allowed to be used in his presence. For instance, if a property-tax client of his law firm began to speak about legislation they were interested in, Speaker Madigan insisted he would immediately stop the conversation in its tracks and inform the client that he could do nothing for them. And nobody else ever said otherwise.

For what seems like an eternity, but probably just for the past year or so, infamous COVID attorney Thomas DeVore has been citing the first paragraph of Section 2 of the Illinois Department of Public Health Act to claim that only IDPH has the power to quarantine or isolate Illinoisans. And, indeed, the statute clearly states, at the top of Section 2, that IDPH has “supreme authority in matters of quarantine and isolation.” Those powers come with some strong individual-consent and due-process checks and balances, including the right to judicial review.