Prairie State Wire

Citizens for Judicial Reform chair Jim Nowlan says there’s a method to the madness in the way Democrats have drawn the new legislative maps that figure to have a hand in the way politics are structured across the state for at least the next decade.

“Last year, one of the four Democrat justices was rejected in his bid for retention and as a result, there's now three elected Dems and three elected Republicans and the Dems are worried that the old 3rd District has become a Republican district strongly for Trump, and therefore they would likely lose their majority unless they tried something such as this rejiggering of the maps,” Nowlan said. “Both the new 3rd and the new 2nd are districts in which former Gov. Bruce Rauner came close to winning in 2012. So the two new districts are certainly competitive districts in which both Republicans and Democrats have opportunities to win.”

A former state legislator and running-mate of former Gov. Richard Ogilvie back in 1972, Nowlan has long been a fair-maps advocate, asserting in a recent Shaw Media editorial the Illinois Supreme Court map is “one issue that sends shivers up the spines of Cook County Democrats is loss of their unbroken, six-decade long control of the partisan Illinois Supreme Court."

In 2016, state Supreme Court Justice Tom Kilbride authored the opinion for a 4-3 Democratic majority in a vote critics charge disregarded a petition with 700,000 signatures calling for an independent redistricting committee to be placed on the ballot.

“Some of my friends and I thought: If Kilbride and the Dem court majority can cynically subvert the will of 700,000 voters in a very public decision, which newspapers across the state lambasted, what might that court do behind the scenes on the hundreds of cases no one ever hears about?” Nowlan wrote in the editorial. “So, last year I was among those involved in the successful effort to reject Kilbride’s bid for retention on the court.”

In addition to blasting the governor for reneging on a pledge he made as a candidate to veto any maps drawn along partisan lines, some Republicans are questioning if Democratic lawmakers have the legal authority to redraw political maps the way they have.

“The official 2020 decennial counts released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week confirm that the Democrats’ redistricting plan violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law, as well as comparable provisions of the Illinois Constitution,” state Rep. Martin McLaughlin (R-Lake Barrington) posted on Facebook.

In a suit that challenges the maps' legality working its way through federal court, the plaintiffs are also seeking to have the task of map redistricting taken out of the hands of politicians and placed under the control of either a bipartisan commission or a court-appointed “special master.”