Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s control of Illinois government comes largely from parliamentary rules that give him an iron grip over lawmakers and legislation, according to a recent report from the Illinois Policy Institute.

The conservative group has a reputation as a Madigan hater. The institute last year produced a documentary film that portrayed the Chicago Democrat as something of a political dictator. This week, the institute promoted a “protest” against Madigan at the University of Illinois Springfield, even as America’s longest tenured legislative leader prepared to be reinstalled as House speaker, a position he has held for all but two years since 1983. Gov. Bruce Rauner, Madigan’s political nemesis, gave more than $600,000 to the institute prior to his election.

Nonetheless, the report, which compared rules of procedure inside the Illinois House of Representatives against rules in 71 legislative chambers in other states, does contain certain truths.

Madigan, or whoever is House speaker, decides who will chair legislative committees and collect $10,000 for presiding over committees that rarely, if ever, meet, or are rubber stamps for the speaker’s whims, the institute says. Don’t want to go along to get along? The speaker has the power to replace committee chairs for any reason. And legislative committees are caricatures of power, given that no bill can be considered by a committee unless it is first released by the Rules Committee, to which every bill is referred. It takes either a unanimous vote of the House or petitions signed by three-fifths of both the minority and majority caucuses to get a bill out of a recalcitrant Rules Committee. That’s never happened.

“As it stands under current rules…no bill has a realistic chance of bypassing the Rules Committee if Madigan opposes it,” write the authors of the institute’s report. Only Maine, which has no provision for bypassing its House Rules Committee, makes it harder to circumvent a rules committee, according to the report.

And who appoints legislators to the Illinois House Rules Committee? That would be Madigan, or his Republican counterpart whose members can only sit and watch as Democrats call the shots.

Got a cold? A hankering to skip work and catch a movie? If you’re a legislator and scheduled to attend a committee meeting, you need not worry, because Madigan, or his Republican counterpart, can appoint substitutes for any reason. According to the institute report, more than 600 substitutions for members of committees were made in 2016.

The institute says that loose substitution rules allow lawmakers to duck tough votes, but the report doesn’t give an example of this happening. Ted Dabrowski, the institute’s vice president of policy who helped author the report, could not provide an example during an interview. He blamed the head-spinning pace of substitutions.

“When you get the number of committee changes that you see there, it’s very hard to keep up with what’s going on,” Dabrowski said.

There is also the matter of scheduling votes.

The institute documented legislative session days when as many as 244 bills were scheduled for House votes, far more than lawmakers could possibly act on during a single day. Only Madigan knows when, or whether, a bill will be up for a vote, the institute reports.

“It becomes a farce,” Dabrowski said. The report is filled with examples of how other states do things differently. Illinois, Dabrowski says, stands alone in the number of legislative rules that concentrate power in the office of the House speaker.

“Nobody, Republican or Democrat, should have this kind of power in running a legislature,” he said.

Things were once different in Illinois, according to Kent Redfield, a retired University of Illinois Springfield professor of political science. During the 1970s, spending plans for agencies were voted on separately, as opposed to being wrapped up in a single budget bill, and it wasn’t unusual for the full House to consider 200 or more amendments to a transportation funding bill, he said.

“The legislature was incredibly decentralized in terms of its processes in the early ’70s,” Redfield recalled. “That changed pretty dramatically when the Republicans got control of the Senate.”

Concentration of power that began during the 1980s accelerated when James “Pate” Philip, a DuPage County Republican, became president of the Senate in 1993, a post he held for a decade, according to Redfield. While the institute’s report concentrates on Madigan, Redfield notes that the Senate operates under similar rules, many of which were enacted during Philip’s tenure.

“They were Pate’s rules before they were Madigan’s rules,” Redfield said.

Senate presidents hold just as much power as House speakers, Redfield says. For example, former Sen. Emil Jones, D-Chicago, who succeeded Philips as Senate president, sat on an ethics bill in 2008 that had been unanimously passed by the Senate, then vetoed by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Jones let the vetoed bill languish. He allowed an override vote only after getting a call from Barack Obama, who was running for president and catching heat for his political upbringing in a state notorious for corruption. The Senate voted 55-0 to override the veto.

“Yes, it’s a very centralized, leadershipdominated process, and it’s gotten moreso,” Redfield says. “There probably is a happy medium between having some things completely decentralized so that it’s chaotic and having something where it’s all leadership controlled.

“We were at one extreme. Now, we’re probably at the other extreme.”

Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].