Political honesty
This is the first court test (Coalition for
Political Honesty v. State Board of Elections, consolidated with Gertz v. State
Board of Elections) of the initiative process
in the 1970 Constitution. The proposed
amendments reached the State Board of
Elections after 650,000 persons signed
petitions in support of them. The three
proposed amendments dealt with banning
legislative double-dipping (holding another
government job), prohibiting conflict of
interest for legislators, and barring legislators from receiving annual salary in
advance (The legislators banned this themselves; see House Bill 3484 on p. 27.). The Coalition for Political Honesty,
which spearheaded the drive to put the
proposed amendments on the ballot, announced September 14 that it will now work
to get bills passed in the legislature covering
the double-dipping and conflict-of-interest
bans it sought by constitutional amendment.
And, disappointed that the Supreme Court
knocked the amendments off the ballot,
Coalition spokesman Patrick Quinn said,
"they haven't knocked the desire for tough
ethics laws out of the minds of Illinois
citizens." One more plank in the Coalition's drive is
to get a constitutional amendment allowing
the "Sunshine Initiative" that would give
citizens the power to propose laws by
initiative petition and enact or reject them in
a statewide election. The petition initiative
process in Illinois is now restricted to
constitutional amendments to the Legislative Article of the state Constitution, which
itself was ratified by a statewide referendum
in 1970. California now has the more open-ended "Sunshine Initiative."
There will be no "political honesty"
constitution amendments on the November
ballot because the Supreme Court on
August 31 upheld the ruling by Cook
County Circuit Court Judge Nathan M.
Cohen that the proposed amendments did
not deal with structural and procedure
changes to the Legislative Article in the
Illinois Constitution.
The other parties
Full slates of candidates for five political
parties other than the Democrats and
Republicans were certified September 2 for
the November ballot by the State Board of
Elections. They are Communist, U.S.
Labor, Socialist Labor, Socialist Workers
and the Libertarian parties. Two other
parties, the Socialist and the American
Independence parties, were not certified
because their petitions did not have the
required 25,000 signatures./ C. S. G.
28 / November 1976 / Illinois Issues