Gov. JB Pritzker is continuing his bid to persuade federal judges to end decades of federal oversight of state hiring practices.
But the anti-corruption watchdogs whose lawsuits led to that oversight recently told a judge that Pritzker and his administration have not yet installed a “durable remedy” to root out politically motivated hiring and promotions, and have further refused to certify under oath that such practices aren’t now occurring.
On Feb. 4, attorneys for longtime government reform advocates Michael Shakman and Paul Lurie filed a brief in Chicago federal court. The brief came as a reply to a mid-January filing from the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, on behalf of Pritzker.
Since the summer of 2020, Pritzker and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul have pursued a campaign in federal court to persuade judges to lift federal oversight of state hiring and promotion decisions. Over that time, Pritzker has repeatedly contended that he believes the federal court’s supervision has gone on long enough, and state government under his administration no longer needs the federal court’s supervision to prevent the illegal political patronage hiring.
Pritzker’s filings have taken aim at a series of court orders. Known as Shakman decrees – named for Michael Shakman, the lead plaintiff on the cases since 1969 - the orders have been entered by judges through the decades since 1972. They require state and local governments in Chicago and Springfield to allow court-appointed monitors to review most hiring practices across a range of government agencies and offices, to ensure those hires and promotions comply with federal laws barring political discrimination in government employment.
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.
However, in recent years, the court’s special master has identified numerous instances in which state agencies have allegedly abused those exemptions, packing political hires into allegedly “exempt,” union-protected jobs created for them, ultimately crowding out others, who may be less politically-connected, from certain jobs and advancement opportunities, among other allegedly improper practices.
U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang in 2020 rejected Pritzker’s contentions that the state had corrected its past illegal patronage hiring practices.
Chang said he believed the state had made “significant” progress, pointing to continuing work to implement a “comprehensive employment plan” and an electronic hiring system, among other measures.
But Chang said “the message” still was “not getting across” to the managers in the agencies doing the hiring.
Pritzker appealed the judge’s decision.
However, as the appeal continues, Pritzker and Shakman have continued sparring before Chang on the questions, as well.
And the governor argued neither the plaintiffs nor the court’s appointed monitors can point to any real instances of political discrimination occurring recently in state hiring.
They assert the Shakman plaintiffs and court monitors are ignoring “very important changes” that have been made in reforming state government hiring practices in the past seven years. The governor contended Shakman and the court monitors are delving deeper into hiring “minutiae,” to find new reasons to ensure the federal oversight continues, all while collecting fees worth millions of dollars.
“In the eighth year of special master oversight and the fifty-third year of this case, continued federal involvement in the State’s hiring practices cannot be predicated the Plaintiffs’ and (court monitor’s) view that the State still could improve in some areas,” Pritzker’s lawyers wrote.
“That will always be true, and that standardless and open-ended approach has led this case to drift to the point where it now lacks even the veneer of having anything to do with federal law.”
Shakman and Lurie also noted the decades over which federal oversight has continued. But they said the mere passage of time is not a good enough reason to lift the supervision, which they argued is still needed.
In their view, they said the state may be nearing the end of the court supervision, but Springfield has not yet put in a place a “durable remedy,” which would include, for instance, searchable electronic records of hiring decisions. Currently, they said, those records remain on paper, which they said is more easily falsified.
While the governor argues Shakman hasn’t produced evidence of continued illegal political hiring, the Shakman plaintiffs said that is because the courts have not directed or empowered the hiring monitors to conduct such discovery or investigation.
The Shakman plaintiffs said they have communicated to the governor that they would be willing to consider backing his request for vacating the decrees over state government, on the condition Pritzker or a representative of his administration agree to swear to the court that they know of no such politically motivated hiring.
To this point, however, Pritzker and his administration have refused to agree to that term. And that only further raises questions concerning the governor’s assertions about the state’s readiness to continue reforms on its own.
“… Plaintiffs have conditioned their support of vacatur on a sworn certification that the Governor’s office is unaware of evidence that such unlawful political discrimination is continuing to occur,” Shakman and Lurie wrote in their brief.
“This is a quite modest request, a pale substitute for discovery and a genuine investigation. The Governor’s steadfast refusal to provide the sort of certification that Chicago, Cook County, and other dismissed entities provided is alarming.
“… The purported absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when the Governor has the means and authority to make a formal declaration on the record through a responsible official,” they added.
Neither Chang nor the Seventh Circuit judges have yet ruled on Pritzker’s latest requests.
Shakman and Lurie are represented by attorneys Edward W. Feldman and Mary Eileen Wells, of the firm of Miller Shakman Levine & Feldman; and attorneys Brian I. Hays and Ernesto Palomo, of the firm of Locke Lord, all of Chicago.