Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is continuing his fight to remove federal court oversight of state government hiring practices, now taking his case to Chicago’s federal appeals court.
On July 8, attorneys for Pritzker, from the office of Pritzker’s fellow Democrat, Attorney General Kwame Raoul, filed an opening brief with the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the appellate judges to end decades of oversight and let Illinois’ state government handle the process of ensuring Illinois’ government agencies aren’t violating federal law by using politics to decide who gets hired and promoted.
In the new filing, Pritzker’s lawyers argue the federal courts have overstepped their bounds in refusing to lift a court decree subjecting the state’s hiring practices to court scrutiny.
Michael L. Shakman
| millershakman.com
Pritzker’s lawyers said a federal judge erred in refusing to accept Pritzker’s assertions that the state governor has “demonstrated commitment to compliance with federal law,” which forbids political patronage hiring practices, like those for which cities, counties and state agencies in Illinois have gained notoriety through the years.
Pritzker claimed the federal court’s continued “decades-long supervision … of the day-to-day operations of state and local governments” in Illinois “exemplify” concerns that Seventh Circuit judges have expressed over federalism, a principle of U.S. government which limits the reach of the federal government into state affairs.
And the governor asserted court-appointed hiring overseers – known by the title “special masters” – have yet to identify any “ongoing violations” of federal law in Illinois government hiring practices.
“Ongoing federal oversight of a State’s operations can be justified only by evidence of ongoing violations of federal law—but neither the plaintiffs, the special master, nor the district court have identified any ongoing violations …, much less the kind of systemwide violations necessary to warrant continued statewide oversight,” Pritzker’s lawyers wrote in their brief.
Pritzker’s arrival before the Seventh Circuit appeals court marks the beginning of the latest chapter in the effort by the Democratic governor – who is a staunch ally of the unions that donate big money to the Democratic Party and that represent most of the workforce in Illinois’ state and local governments – to combat the so-called Shakman Decrees.
The decrees date back to the early 1970s, when Chicago lawyers Michael Shakman and Paul Lurie won their first round in court against the Cook County Democratic Party in their fight against patronage. The decrees, which have been added to and expanded through the ensuing decades, have forbidden Illinois government officials from letting politics improperly control government jobs and promotions.
For government jobs which involve policymaking, the courts have agreed that political allegiances could be an appropriate consideration. A number of those jobs have been consequently exempted from court oversight.
But in 2020, Pritzker argued those decrees are no longer needed, because he claimed the state had corrected the patronage hiring and employment targets targeted by those decrees.
Shakman, still serving as the lead plaintiff in the action, scoffed at such notions, and asserted the opposite is true: The state government actually needs more oversight, not less – at least until the state government can prove its own hiring review and oversight policies actually accomplish what Pritzker said they do.
U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang largely sided with Shakman on the question. While he acknowledged the state has made “significant” progress on the employment practices in question, he agreed the state needed to show its plan was more than just more words.
Judge Chang said "the message is not getting across" to the managers doing the hiring.
The “devil is not just in the details, but in the implementation,” Chang said in his ruling.
The judge granted the request to expand the scope of the special master’s oversight of state hiring.
The ruling prompted Pritzker to appeal.
In the brief, Pritzker argued Judge Chang compounded an error made by other judges who have handled the Shakman decrees, in allowing Shakman to continue pressing the case, at all.
Pritzker’s lawyers asserted the decrees should be tossed, in part, because Shakman and Lurie lack standing under the law as plaintiffs in these matters.
The judges, Pritzker argued, have improperly simply replaced Shakman and his co-plaintiffs with “the proper plaintiffs – state employees,” whose First Amendment rights would be violated by allowing state agencies to hire, fire or refuse to promote workers based on their political beliefs and allegiances.
And further, Pritzker argued, the plaintiffs and the special master have failed to show that the court’s continued oversight of state hiring practices is “reasonably tethered to any actual legal violations.”
Without standing and without such constitutional legal “tether,” Pritzker asserted, federal oversight of state hiring practices must end.
“…It is past time to “’return’ the ‘responsibility for discharging the State’s obligations . . . to the State and its officials,’ and terminate the decree,” Pritzker’s lawyers said.
Neither Shakman nor the court-appointed special master have yet replied to Pritzker’s brief.
Shakman and Lurie, who are licensed lawyers in Illinois, have been represented by the Chicago firm of Locke Lord, and Shakman's firm of Miller, Shakman, Levine & Feldman.
Lurie is with the Chicago firm of Schiff Hardin.