Illinois businesses are under stress from lawmakers and lawyers, and the damage could go beyond repair, if Illinois voters don't reject a ballot measure to rewrite the state constitution to give unions broad new powers, says Tim Simeone, of the Technology and Manufacturing Assocation
Just when you think Democrats in the Illinois General Assembly could not possibly come up with anything more totalitarian than canceling elections in places where opposition to their regime is growing, a member of the super majority came up with one.
Democrats say the changes are needed to boost diversity on the bench. Republican critics say the changes are simply efforts by Democrats to boost their hold on power in the state's courts
Democrat mapmakers were "motivated by partisan political considerations," a panel of federal judges said, so it doesn't matter that they divided Latino and Black populations up among various districts, rather than maximizing majority minority districts
Republicans and Latino and Black advocates told a panel of federal judges that Illinois Democrats drew a new state legislative district map solely to protect Democratic incumbents and boost their party power, stepping on Black and Latino voting rights in the process.
Madison, St. Clair and Cook Counties together ranked No. 5 in the American Tort Reform Association’s (ATRA) annual “Judicial Hellholes” report, up from last year’s No. 8 ranking.
Illinois' top Democratic lawmakers asked a panel of federal judges to ignore 'remedial maps' filed by Latino and Black advocacy organizations, with Republican lawmakers, even though the challengers' maps appear to significantly boost the number of majority-minority legislative districts.
The proposed new map, filed with federal judges, would nearly triple the number of majority Latino state House and Senate districts, compared to plan approved by Democrats and signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in September
Unusual bid by the current Democratic majority in Springfield to not only strip away conscience protections from COVID vaccine mandate objectors, but declare what lawmakers meant decades earlier when the IL Conscience Act was approved, may open those changes to the law up to legal challenges.
Courts will ultimately be left to unravel whether the Democrats' "declaration of existing law" should now allow the state and employers to enforce vaccine mandates against religious objectors, when courts have been skeptical, at best.
Downstate attorney Tom Devore, who is behind a barrage of lawsuits vs Gov. JB Pritzker and others, says proposed changes to the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act are an 'absurd' attempt to legally justify past actions by Pritzker related to COVID vaccine mandates and COVID-related restrictions.
Gov. JB Pritzker and others have argued the law was never intended to protect anyone other than doctors, and certainly not people objecting to being forced to take COVID vaccines
A panel of federal judges said Democrats' decision to use "population estimates," rather than Census data resulted in unbalanced districts, under a plan rushed through simply to retain firm grip on power
Democrats intend to use a late August special session to redraw Illinois' state legislative districts to align with Census data, but Republicans say their failure to draft legally valid maps earlier this year means the task should go to a special redistricting commission, under Illinois' state constitution.
Illinois Republican lawmakers said their analysis of data released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week shows Democrat-drawn legislative district maps don't meet the requirements of federal law, as they earlier alleged in their lawsuit challenging the maps.
Illinois Democrats assert the lawsuits brought by GOP leaders and a Mexican legal group, which accuse the Democrats of improperly drawing district boundaries without official Census data, must fail because there is no official Census data to compare their new maps against.
