Hey legislators, end legalized bribery in Illinois now

We need a drop-dead date on ending legalized bribery in Illinois.

Congress managed to do it in 1992. The Illinois Legislature can certainly do it now.

We’re thinking April 1, 2020 — April Fool’s Day. That would give elected officials in Illinois a final three months to legally put millions of dollars in campaign donations entirely to personal uses, such as buying a BMW, paying a child’s college tuition, playing the slots at Rivers Casino or padding a retirement account.

One last chance to grab what they can, like looters before the cops arrive.

Then the game is over.

Like handing out BMWs

One of the more indefensible scams in Illinois politics is the legal right of dozens of officeholders to take money donated to their campaigns — which you might think is supposed to be spent on, you know, campaigns — and blow it on pretty much whatever they want.

Makes you wonder why a lobbyist can’t just give an elected official that BMW instead of campaign cash. It amounts to the same thing.

In 1998, the Legislature approved an ethics law that was supposed to put an end to this invitation to bribery, or so it seemed at the time.

The Legislature outlawed the practice of public officials paying themselves or their family members from their campaign funds, allowing just two exceptions. The ban would not apply to payments for “services actually rendered.” And, in a grandfathering clause, whatever money public officials had in their campaign accounts as of June 30, 1998, would still be theirs to do with as they wished.

Barack Obama, then a state senator, played a leading role in pushing through the new law, which had all the trappings of reform. In not much time at all, good government types predicted, this particular form of legalized bribery would be history.

How naive.

We got reform, yes, but at a snail’s pace.

Pocketed $5 million so far

More than 20 years down the road, at least 55 public officials have chosen to keep some or all of that cash for themselves, though nearly all of them wait until they retire to convert it to personal use so as to avoid the wrath of the voters. And as an investigative story by Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown revealed in July, those former elected officials have pocketed a total of more than $5 million since the law took effect.

Now, in a follow-up report last week by Brown and three other reporters — Robert Herguth, Tim Novak and Lauren FitzPatrick — the Sun-Times revealed how Illinois Senate President John Cullerton used that campaign money as collateral to get a $110,000 line of credit without putting up any personal assets.

Had Cullerton borrowed or taken the money directly from his campaign fund, he would have been required to disclose the transaction. But because he instead used the campaign funds as collateral, he could keep things quiet. Nor did he have to reveal the terms of the loan, though he obtained it from a politically connected Chicago bank.

A member of the board of directors is former state Sen. James DeLeo, Cullerton’s friend and business partner.

Again, nothing illegal. But it feels sneaky.

The game goes on

The heart of the problem, as we see it, is that the 1998 law allows elected officials to continue to accept campaign donations that can be put to personal use. The game is smaller now, and it will peter out eventually — figure a decade or so — but it goes on.

Take, for example, a hypothetical politician who had $100,000 in his campaign account on June 30, 1998. Under the reform law, that’s the amount of money he still could convert to personal use. Brown calls it the politician’s “magic number.”

But what if the politician spends that $100,000 on actual campaign expenses over the years, such as salaries for staffers, TV ads and yard signs? What if his campaign fund dwindles to almost zero? Has he missed his chance to keep the money for himself?

No. The politician’s magic number is still $100,000. That never changes. And he is free to convert new campaign donations, up to his magic number, to personal purposes — for that BMW or the slots at Rivers or whatever.

So two decades after the reform law went into effect, the game has been shrunk but goes on. It remains perfectly legal for a few dozen politicians or more to accept campaign contributions that are indistinguishable from personal bribes.

End the exemption

The 1998 law should not have included such a generous exemption. Campaign money should be campaign money. All officeholders and office seekers in Illinois should be barred — now and completely — from using campaign funds for personal expenses.

Congress allowed only a short grace period before setting a hard cutoff, and the state Legislature can still do the same.

We’re thinking April 1.

No more fooling around.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.