In coming days, the Illinois Supreme Court will decide the fate of a state law that a Springfield judge said unconstitutionally changed the state's election rules in the middle of an election cycle in a bid to block Republican candidates from challenging incumbent Democratic state lawmakers for seats in the General Assembly this fall.
In court and in public statements, the state's top Democratic officials have defended that law, claiming it was needed to prevent party insiders from using secret backroom deals to anoint candidates for office who never faced voters in a primary vote.
As both sides await the decision from court concerning if the law can take effect, the lawyers who have led the constitutional challenge to block the law say the state's voters and courts should take note that those same Democratic defenders of the law have all rushed to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for President - even though Harris has been selected by party insiders and has never faced voters in a presidential primary election.
"In defending anti-slating legislation that purports to apply to the 2024 election after more than a dozen potential candidates had begun the slating process to appear on the 2024 general election ballot, the Illinois Attorney General and the Speaker of the House insisted that it was necessary to ensure that voters, not political insiders, decide which candidates appear on the general election ballot," said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center.
"But now, in endorsing Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, the Illinois Speaker, Attorney General, and Governor prefer to ensure that their Party’s 2024 presidential candidate is chosen by party leaders, not voters. They have shown their true colors."
Illinois House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch and Governor JB Pritzker did not respond to requests from The Record for comment.
In May, Speaker Welch and his Democratic supermajority in the Illinois General Assembly passed a new law which significantly rewrote the rules by which candidates for the state House and state Senate can place their names on the ballot.
Initially known as Senate Bill 2412, the law specifically would block political parties from using a process known as "slating" to select candidates to run for state legislative office after the primary election has been completed.
Essentially, the new law states that, if candidates wish to secure their party's nomination for a seat in the state legislature, they must first run in their party's primary election.
Under the previous rules, parties who had no official nominees for a particular elected office after the spring primary election had 75 days after the primary to "slate" candidates to run as the official party nominee in such races.
When a candidate is slated, they enjoy significant benefits over independent candidates, including the need to collect fewer voter signatures on the nominating petitions they must file with election authorities.
This year, the slating deadline was to be June 3.
However, six weeks after the March 19 primary, and with just about four weeks until the June 3 deadline, Democrats pushed SB2412 through both houses of the General Assembly in less than 48 hours. Pritzker, also a Democrat, quickly signed the legislation, upending the candidate nomination process that was already underway.
While the changes would apply to all political parties, it could be particularly harmful to Republican candidates this fall. The GOP intended to rely on that process to ensure it had candidates on the ballot to run against Democratic incumbents in the November general election.
Pritzker and Welch have praised the law, with the governor particularly calling it needed "ethics reform" to prevent party insiders from using backroom deals to choose candidates for office, particularly when those candidates have never faced voters in a primary election.
Pritzker and other Democrats said the changes to the law were needed to ensure voters picked the candidates, not party bosses.
Republicans, however, said the law amounted to brazen election interference by a partisan supermajority, trampling Republicans' rights under the guise of promoting democracy.
With the changes, Democrats could all but ensure at least 53 Democratic incumbent state lawmakers will face no competition at the ballot box this fall.
There are 138 state legislative contests on the ballot this fall across Illinois.
Prospective Republican candidates filed suit on May 11, about a week after Pritzker signed SB2412 into law. They are represented in the action by attorney Schwab and others from the Liberty Justice Center, of Chicago.
The lawsuit claims Democrats unconstitutionally changed election rules for 2024 in the middle of the election cycle, violating the rights of voters and of candidates seeking office.
Welch was not named as a defendant in the action. But the Speaker won court permission to intervene in the case to defend the law.
Welch's lawyers - longtime Democratic operatives who previously had been closely tied to now-indicted former House Speaker and Democratic Party chairman Michael J. Madigan - have argued the law could amount to a "dirty trick." But they said that does not make the law unconstitutional, because election rules are under the control of state lawmakers and the new rules impose only a "reasonable restriction" on candidates' ability to run for office.
"Any candidate seeking to carry an established party’s banner in the general election must first prevail in the party’s primary election and run the risk that their party’s voters may choose someone else," Welch and his lawyers wrote.
Judge Noll said the case was not merely about candidates kicked off the ballot through any traditional process. Rather, she said the case centered on actions taken by the state's Democratic legislative supermajority to prevent candidates from seeking office and to deny voters a realistic choice in November's elections.
She said the action violated those constitutional rights and Noll blocked state election authorities from using the law to kick the candidate plaintiffs who signed onto the lawsuit off the ballot.
Welch immediately appealed that decision, and is asking the Illinois Supreme Court to overturn Noll's ruling.
In their filing at the Illinois Supreme Court, Welch and his lawyers assert Noll overstepped her authority, because judges have no authority to review lawmakers' decisions concerning ballot access until after election authorities have reviewed the candidates' nominating petitions and determined if they comply with the rules.
In reply, plaintiffs said their lawsuit isn't about whether the state can boot particular candidates from the ballot under the traditional petition challenge process. Rather, they said, the law is blatantly unconstitutional, as they say it was written solely to prevent election challenges to incumbents.
"It’s unreasonable and discriminatory to change the slating process in the middle of that process, when Plaintiffs had relied on it to access the ballot and are attempting to comply with it," the Republican candidates' lawyers wrote.
The law, they said, "ensures that voters have less choice in the 2024 election."
The Illinois Supreme Court has yet to rule in the case, even though the court agreed to speed up the process, given the dwindling days left for ballots must be printed in Illinois. According to the court's website, the final brief in the case was filed July 8.
In the meantime, however, Illinois Democrats, including Welch and Pritzker, have joined Democratic Party leaders nationwide in heartily endorsing the apparent presidential candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris was not considered a presidential candidate until Sunday, July 21, when President Joe Biden posted statements on social media indicating he would withdraw from the presidential election rematch with Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and would endorse Harris as his replacement as the presumptive nominee.
In the winter and spring of 2024, Biden had run unopposed in Democratic primaries throughout the country. No delegates to the Democratic National Convention had indicated their support for any other candidates, including Harris.
However, within a day of the announcement, Harris had seemingly secured the support of enough Democratic Party delegates to appear to have wrapped up the Democratic nomination.
Welch and Pritzker both endorsed Harris for President on Monday, July 22, less than 24 hours after Biden announced he had withdrawn.
In his statement endorsing Harris, Welch said Democrats were choosing "democracy, justice and the rule of law."
"Democrats see the challenges our country faces, and we choose Kamala Harris to lead us forward," Welch said.
Welch's statement, however, did not claim that Democratic Party voters had a say in the process through any kind of democratic vote.
Indeed, Harris has never faced Democratic presidential primary election voters in any vote. In 2020, Harris, then a senator from California, withdrew from the race for the Democratic nomination before the first primary elections or party caucuses in that election cycle.
She did not declare her candidacy for president in 2024 until after President Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race, after the conclusion of every primary election.
Both Welch and Pritzker did not respond to questions from The Record concerning how their support for Harris for President squares with their support for a new law that would disqualify Republican state legislative nominees on the grounds that they did not run in the primary election.
Schwab, from the Liberty Justice Center, said the seeming incongruity in the two positions betrays the Democratic officials' position.
"On the one hand, there’s not much to say. To ask the question is to answer it," Schwab said. "It’s not about ensuring voters choose candidates. It’s about political power. Their endorsement of Harris shows that."