Illinois Governors VI: George Ryan, Rod Blagojevich, and Pat Quinn

George Ryan (1999-2003), Republican

convicted sentenced to 6 1/2 years

Ryan was born in Maquoketa, IA in 1934, and grew up in Kankakee County, IL.  He worked in his father's drug stores, and attended the Ferris State College of Pharmacy in Michigan.  Ryan was drafted and sent to Korea during the Korean War and served 13 months as a base pharmacist there and then returned to build his family's pharmacy business into a lucrative state-wide business. 

He served on the Kankakee County Board from 1968-1973.  He then served in the Illinois House from 1973 to 1983 where he rose to become minority leader and then speaker.  Then he served as Lt. Governor under James Thompson, then as secretary of state from 1991-1999. From 1999 to 2003 he served as governor.  

As governor he followed the usual path of being in favor of education spending, road construction, and mass transit.  More controversially he led a trade mission to Cuba, and was the first sitting governor to meet with Fidel Castro.  He also opposed the death penalty in Illinois because he felt it was arbitrary and too many questionable verdicts had led to the death penalty.  As a result he commuted all death row inmates (about 160 or so) at the time he left office in 1999.  

It was only after leaving office that he started to encounter his legal problems, for things done before he was governor, when he was secretary of state.  

Willis Mini-van

  His problems stemmed from a tragic accident in I-94 in Wisconsin in November 1994, where a piece of metal fell off a truck in front of a minivan where the pastor Duane Scott Willis, his wife and all six of their children were passengers.  Running over the piece of metal punctured the gas tank of the minivan causing it to burst into flames.  While Willis and his wife escaped with relatively minor burns, his six children were incinerated.   As it was subsequently determined, the driver of the truck whence the metal had fallen had obtained his Illinois drivers license through a bribe and was apparently unqualified to be operating a truck.
In the subsequent investigation into the Secretary of State's office it uncovered a pattern of bribery and corruption that ultimately led to George Ryan to be sentenced to 6 and 1/2 years in Federal prison after conviction on 20 of 22 counts of racketeering, bribery, extortion, money laundering and tax fraud (1).   Ryan has now been released to home confinement as of January 2013.    
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Rod Blagojevich (2003-2009) Democrat

convicted, sentenced 14 years

Blagojevich, born in 1956 in Chicago was the son of immigrants from Serbia.  He went to school at the University of Tampa then transferring to Northwestern, where he graduated in 1979 with a BA in history. He got his law degree from Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA.  He is married to Patricia Mell, daughter of former Chicago Alderman Richard Mell. He was a law clerk for Chicago Alderman Ed Vrdolyak, and then became an assistant prosecutor for Cook County for Richard M. Daley, then State's attorney and later mayor of Chicago.   In 1992 he was elected to the Illinois House from the North Side of Chicago.  In 1996 he was elected to the US Congress, taking back for the Democrats the seat won by Michael Flanagan over the disgraced longtime congressman Dan Rostenkowski, who was convicted of mail fraud.  He was reelected twice more as Congressman from the district.  Interestingly he was one of only 81 house Democrats who voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2002.  He was alone among the Democrats in the state delegation to have done so.

As candidate for governor in 2002 he narrowly defeated two opponents, IL attorney general Roland Burris and Chicago Public Schools superintendent Paul Vallas.  Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama, and David Wilhelm in various capacities supported Blagojevich's run for governor.  The Republican candidate was Illinois attorney general Jim Ryan. Though no relation to George Ryan, Blagojevich successfully linked the two together and the need for "change".   

By 2006, the Blagojevich administrated had its own bad smells to contend with lone statewide Republican Judy Barr Topinka, state treasurer, running a campaign against Blagojevich that emphasized his corruption.  Nevertheless she lost the election.  

Some of the change that Blagojevich promoted was ethics reform, death penalty reform, state Earned Income Tax Credit, KidCare and FamilyCare heath care programs, sexual orientation discrimination bans.  The costs of these programs was borne by raiding the state pension funds and expanding gambling in the state,  rather than tax increases. 

Blagojevich faced mounting opposition even from his own party as he did things and said things that alienated them.  He refused to live in Springfield, and seldom talked to members of the legislature.   Mayor Richard M. Daley went so far as to say that Blagojevich was "cuckoo".  One could go on and on cataloging the legislative outrages of this governor but a fairly good summary is found here.

Wiretaps conducted by the US attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, convinced him to arrest Blagojevich at his home.  As it appeared the governor had openly sought to "sell" the open seat left when Barack Obama was elected President, the Illinois governor being given the option to appoint someone to fill the remainder of Obama's senatorial term until the next general election.  On the tape he remarked that "I've got this thing, and it's fucking golden. I'm just not giving it up for fucking nothing."  Subsequently he was removed from office on a 59-0 impeachment vote, and banned from holding political office in Illinois.  Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn succeeded him in office.   He was convicted in Federal court in 2011 of all charges associated with the sale of the senate seat, and for extortion relating to a children's hospital and a race track.   In the Federal trial for corruption he was sentenced to 14 years in Federal prison, and is now incarcerated in Englewood Colorado.  He will not be eligible for release until 2024.   
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Patrick Joseph Quinn III (2009-present), Democrat

Quinn was born in 1948 in Hinsdale, IL.   He earned a degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1971.  He received his law degree in 1980 from Northwestern University.   He served as an aide to Governor Dan Walker.   Early on he supported an initiative to increase the voter referendum as a way of influencing policy, but this was ruled unconstitutional by the Illinois supreme court.  Another initiative more successful was his effort to cut back on the number of members of the Illinois House, reducing the number from 177 to 118 members, and eliminating cumulative voting and multiple member districts.   Others have suggested however that the old multiple member districts produced a better legislature.  

In 1982 he became commissioner of the Cook County board of tax appeals.  After one prior unsuccessful run, he was elected state treasurer from 1991 to 1995.  He was critical of George Ryan and ran against him for Secretary of State in 1994.   In 1996 he ran for the open Democratic seat in the US senate vacated by Paul Simon, but Dick Durbin won that contest.   Quinn was an early teabagger, encouraging voters to express their displeasure with the approval of an increase in the salaries of state legislators under Jim Edgar by mailing in tea bags, and encouraged a similar protest against Commonwealth Edison's increase in rates.  

In 2002 he was elected Lt. Governor on Rod Blagojevich's ticket, but did not remain a supporter of Blagojevich, and by 2006 they were pretty much political enemies. In 2010 he narrowly won reelection in his own right against Republican Bill Brady, who in a Republican year was widely expected to win.    In a lame duck session after the 2010 election Quinn and the legislature passed a 66% personal income tax increase and also increased corporate income tax rates.  The new legislature coming in in January 2010 would never have approved these changes, so obviously it had to be done in this sneaky way.  In order to accomplish this the legislature actually stopped time and delayed the midnight hour a couple of hours past midnight.  

Businesses, owing to the tax structure of the state, one of the most confiscatory in the nation, are relocating outside of Illinois.  The most recent example of this is Office Depot's decision to locate its corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, FL.    However, so far, the teacher's unions, the SEIU and anyone else on the state payroll is well pleased with the governor although a crisis regarding pension funding still looms.