On behalf of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, I am pleased to offer the latest edition of our guidebook to the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

The new edition includes amendments to Chapter Four, which outlines exemptions to FOIA requests. It also updates the section of Chapter One that outlines changes proposed during the spring 2011 session of the Illinois General Assembly.

Please click here to be redirected to the Web page where the revised guidebook can be downloaded free of charge.

Please notice the legislation that passed the House and Senate identified in Chapter One as it may have a great impact on how individuals receive the information they seek. The Institute will be tracking these bills and make adjustments to this guidebook if necessary.

This ongoing project is the result of efforts put in by a number of people here at the Institute and former Illinois statehouse reporter Adriana Colindres. Our continued thanks to them as well as the Office of the Illinois Attorney General for keeping this guide updated. We also extend our thanks to the Illinois Press Association in their efforts to make this guidebook more available to the public and members of the media.

When it was first proposed, the goal of this guidebook was to help journalists and the general public understand the state’s new FOIA law. It not only meets that goal but also serves as a record of how the laws have changed since its implementation in January 2010. In some instances, information that was once available to the public through FOIA is now restricted.

Because this is an ongoing project, we hope anyone with suggestions on how we can better the guidebook or its distribution would contact the Institute at: 618-453-4009.

The 2011 session of the Illinois Legislature is in the process of redrawing legislative and congressional district lines to reflect population changes in the state. Historically, this has been a controversial process in Illinois, one that often contributes to public cynicism and disgust for its secretive and backroom nature.

Efforts to change this process failed last year. There was a lack of consensus in how to proceed in the Legislature and a late start in trying to execute a ballot initiative.

Last year, both Florida and California approved voter initiatives that changed the redistricting processes in those states so redistricting is done by commissions and without consideration to party registrations or residency. Those two states are big states with large minority populations, just like Illinois. Their processes will have to pass muster in the federal courts. If successful in those states, there is no reason Illinois lawmakers can’t simply lift their new laws off the shelf and enact them here.

Or, reform groups could make them ballot language and attempt to enact them by voter referendum. The bottom line is that policy-makers and reform-minded groups in Illinois need to pay close attention to the efforts underway in Florida and California to see if they might work here.

The 2010 elections left Democrats in control of both chambers of the Illinois General Assembly as well as the governorship. All that has led to a widely held view that with the Democrats in total control of the law-making process, they will draw districts that favor Democratic incumbents or Democratic candidates.

That may be. Elections have consequences, as the saying goes. All this raises the question of what should be done now and in the future to try to improve the process in Illinois. Several options merit consideration:

1. However this process is done, the end result must be to help restore citizen confidence and respect for the Legislature and for public officials.

2. There must be meaningful transparency. At each step of the way, citizens must be assured of the opportunity to see what decisions are being made and have input on them. People may not like the decisions that are ultimately made but they will not respect them or the process if they do not feel they had any say in what was done. Citizens should be given enough time to see the proposed plan to give lawmakers meaningful input. Revealing a plan in the morning and approving it by the end of the day is not meaningful input. Not only might citizens actually see problems that could be corrected, but it might help restore their confidence in the political process.

3. The Voting Rights Act has to be respected. Not only is this required by the federal courts, it is also desirable public policy. Lawmakers can’t pack minority groups together to limit their influence on elections, nor can they spread them so far apart as to dilute their ability to elect representation. It is a difficult balancing act but one that is necessary to make sure legislative and congressional districts reflect the true diversity of our state and nation and that the strength of that diversity shows up on the floor of legislatures and in the Congress.

4. Drafters should ignore the residences of incumbents and party registrations of citizens. Few things create more cynicism about our government than the notion that in this process, legislators are picking their constituents instead of the other way around.

5. A special burden falls upon the majority party to conduct itself in this process as fairly as possible. There will be a great temptation to say “we’ve got the votes, we’ll do what we want.” That comes off as politics as usual. It turns off people. It discourages respect for legislators and legislative institutions.

6. Finally, legislators and reform minded leaders should be looking to the future. As I mentioned at the beginning, efforts to change this process failed last year. For better or worse, we are stuck with the current process. Rather than just get through this residstricting in 2011 and the elections in 2012, we need to restart reform efforts immediately after the November elections. Those efforts can take place on two tracks. Legislative leaders can initiate reform efforts in the newly constituted General Assembly in 2013. Second, reform groups can begin a new ballot initiative, just in case the Legislature fails to act, or acts in an inadequate manner. For both legislators and reform groups, Illinois needs to act while this current debate and this experience is fresh in our memories.

It is also important to act now to change the process of 2021 in order remove this debate from the individual personalities and politics of that era. We can do this with the current experience fresh in our minds without having to consider what it means for this legislator or that leader or which political party.

We can also learn from the experience of other states in this cycle.

In 2009, when a prosecutor went to court to force David Protess to release information compiled by journalism students working on his famous Innocence Project, Northwestern University and the Medill School of Journalism came to the defense of the popular, pugnacious professor. After all, Protess had made the school famous for having helped free 12 men who had been wrongfully convicted, including five from death row.

Two years later, the university and Protess are in an ugly fight. The university removed him from his classroom, claiming he made misleading statements to its lawyers. Protess responded by accusing the university of conducting a “smear campaign” in search of a fall guy.

One issue in the dispute is whether Protess’ students are covered by the Illinois “Shield Law” permitting reporters to protect confidential sources and information. The university, which at first was ready to defend the reporters’ privilege of the students, now says that Protess hid the fact that he had provided confidential student memos relating to a murder case to a defense lawyer. By providing the memos to the lawyer, Protess may have waived the privilege, the university says.

In explaining its decision to back away from Protess, the university said in a statement this month it had “uncovered numerous examples of Protess knowingly making false and misleading statements to the dean, to University attorneys, and to others. Such actions undermine the integrity of Medill, the University, the Innocence Project, students, alumni, faculty, the press, the public, the State and the Court.”

In 2008 it looked as though the case of Anthony McKinney was the latest of Protess’ triumphs. Based on evidence largely collected by Protess and his journalism students, lawyers went to court to seek a new trial for McKinney, who had been convicted of the 1978 murder of a security guard in Harvey, Ill. Protess’ students found a witness who said McKinney was not present at the murder scene.

Protess recently told a reporter for the Chicago Reader that “Of all the many investigations I’ve ever been involved with, this was about the most airtight case of innocence.”

“If the McKinney case had been handled the way law enforcement has handled every one of my cases, Anthony McKinney would have been released two years ago.”

But Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez did not react the way others had. Instead she was suspicious of the tactics used by the students, calling into question the $40 of cab fare that students paid to the witness who said McKinney was not at the murder scene.

Alvarez went to court in 2009 seeking 11 categories of information including “notes, memoranda, reports and summaries” prepared by the students. She also sought the students’ grades, Protess’ course syllabus and grading criteria.

Judge Diane Cannon refused to force Protess to turn over the grades, but, based on the account in the Chicago Reader, appeared unconvinced student journalists should be covered by the Shield law.

“Is someone who has a Web site a journalist?” she reportedly said at a hearing in June, 2010. “And if I’m going to make that decision, I think it will be good news to all the parents in this state that they now have journalists for children.”

Around the time of the hearing, Sidley Austin, the firm representing the university and Protess, concluded it had received misleading information about the student work. It withdrew from the case and the university hired Jenner & Block to conduct an inquiry into what had happened. Former prosecutors at the law firm imaged the hard drives of Protess’ computer.

The university said the inquiry found Protess “sent them a falsified communication in an attempt to hide the fact that the student memos had been shared with Mr. McKinney’s lawyers” in December 2009.

Protess had turned over a November 2007 email stating, “My position about memos, as you know, is that we don’t keep copies….My position about memos, as you know, is that we share everything with the legal team, and don’t keep copies….”

In other words, Protess had removed the phrase about sharing the memos with the legal team.

The university maintains that Protess knew from the start that sharing the memos jeopardized that reporters’ privilege claim. But Protess says the university knew from the beginning the memos had been shared. He also maintains the altered email had a notation at the top saying that part was redacted.

Protess says the phrase he removed was inaccurate and he was altering the email to make it more truthful. By stating “everything” was turned over, the email suggested every student document was turned over to a lawyer for McKinney. In fact, many student documents were of a personal nature and never were included in the file turned over to the defense lawyer, he said.

Protess also said his wife had been fighting cancer at the time and his memory was not as clear for that reason.

Medill removed Protess from his signature class earlier this semester, leading students to protest his absence. Dean John Lavine met with the faculty behind closed doors earlier this month to present them with Jenner & Block’s findings. Then the university released its statement explaining the action.

In response, Protess called for an independent review of the entire matter and raised the question of whether Dean Lavine is acting “in retaliation” for Protess’ involvement in a 2008 scandal concerning quotes Lavine had used in a Medill alumni magazine. Protess spoke to students who might have made the statements quoted by the dean and found that none had. The university cleared Lavine although the source for the quotes was not identified.

“I want to be clear, I’m not accusing the dean of anything here,” Protess said in an interview with the Daily Northwestern this month. “I’m saying, ‘Let’s have an independent, impartial review that looks at the problems that have occurred in the past few years.’”

Protess, who has taken leave this semester, has started a new Chicago Innocence Project intended to involve journalism students from other journalism schools.

Meanwhile, McKinney remains locked up in the psychiatric unit of the state prison at Dixon, Ill.

The following is an outline of the testimony Dr. Jackson submitted to the Illinois Senate Redistricting Committee’s meeting on April 21, 2011 in Carbondale, Ill.

I want to offer comments that are a mixture of the theoretical and the practical. I will offer a bit about what the federal and state constitutions require and what the standard textbooks say about redistricting. At the same time I want to acknowledge that practical politics is always a driving force in these decisions. I will close by advocating that in the future, getting ready for the next round in 2020, the state should adopt a constitutional amendment which changes the way this process is done.

The Illinois Constitution provides that, “Legislative Districts shall be compact, contiguous and substantially equal in population.” This means the districts must follow the familiar rule of “one person one vote” and the districts must be contiguous. In the 2001 map, many districts were not compact by any reasonable definition and that value was sacrificed for other – mostly political – considerations. (For example, see the 4th, 15th, 17th and 19th Congressional Districts).

The General Assembly is given until June 30th to complete and adopt a plan. If they cannot agree on a plan by that date an eight member Redistricting Commission is appointed. That commission is comprised of four persons from the Democratic Party and four from the Republican Party nominated by the legislative leaders in both chambers. If that Commission can’t produce a plan by August 10th, the “tie breaker” is randomly chosen by pulling one of two names out of a hat. That unique tie-breaker rule is the only one of its kind in the nation. Three of the past four cycles have produced the need for the tie-breaker. The luck of the draw has led to the Democrats winning and drawing the map twice and the Republicans once.

In addition, the U. S. Constitution and a host of court decisions must be followed in drawing the map. The most notable of these is that the Voting Rights Act must be followed. That will result in a number of “majority-minority” districts which guarantee that some districts will almost certainly produce African-American and less often, Hispanic, members of the General Assembly and Congress.

As for the textbooks, I will rely on Congressional Redistricting by David Butler and Bruce Cain, which holds that there are “Considerations Involving Form,” which should be adhered: equal numbers, following natural frontiers, and compactness and contiguity. Those are important values and not always easy to achieve. The Butler and Crain book also recommends “Considerations Involving Outcome” which include: “party fairness,” “ethnic fairness,” and “party competition.”

The ethnic fairness criteria must be followed when it comes to the “majority-minority” districts for African-Americans and Hispanics; however, there are other ethnic groups clamoring to be heard, e.g. the Chinese in and around Chinatown in Chicago. Just how many Hispanic Districts might be created also remains to be seen.

A recent report from the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights featured in the April 11 edition of Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax noted the Latino population increased 32.5% overall and increased by big numbers in the top ten Senate and House Districts where most settled since 2000. The new data shows Latinos now make up 15.8 percent of the state’s total population; however, they only make up 6.8 percent of the state legislature. They only have one of the state’s congressional seats currently.

I want to concentrate on the “party fairness” and “party competition” variables. I think we should start the conversation with the premise that party interests and incumbent interests will be served. We all know that to be the case. The U. S. Supreme Court has also recognized that fact in the 2004 case of Vieth v. Jubelirer. There the court majority said that party could be a factor in the redistricting process and they were not going to try to outlaw it. If you accept party considerations, than you also get incumbent protection considerations as a part of the bargain.

The question then becomes how to define the party fairness and party competition criteria. It also becomes whether you take these two variables as the sole drivers of the process and in effect as the only thing that really counts after the constitutional requirements are met.

There is a political science concept which is relevant here – the “Votes to Seats” ratio. That is, there should be some fairly direct relationship between the total votes for one party in the state and the seats won in the legislative body. If they are wildly out of balance because of the power of one party or the other, you have a pretty clear case of a partisan gerrymander.

The problem with that votes to seats concept, of course, is which votes in which elections to count in establishing the standard. We used to have in Illinois the trusty measure of the votes cast in the University of Illinois Board of Trustees races as a standard of party strength in the state, but that measure was lost with the advent of an appointed board.

I think it is clear that Illinois is a competitive state overall , but one which “leans Democratic” by most objective measures. That has been the case since the Democrats took charge of state government in 2002. From 2002 through 2008, Illinois was one of the “bluest of the blue states” as political scientist Paul Green once said.

But now there are the 2010 election results to consider. That is why I stress that Illinois is basically a competitive state but still “leans blue.” For example, the Democrats and the Republicans split the results for the top two offices in 2010, i.e. Pat Quinn won the Governor’s race and Mark Kirk won the Senate office, both in close elections.

The top five constitutional officers produced similarly divided results. The Democrats won three and the Republicans won two of those. The Democrats retained control of both the House and the Senate, but their margin was narrower after the 2010 elections.

So, here are my overall strategic recommendations: First, the map makers should start out with some fairly clear expectations that party and incumbent interests will be regarded and respected. Why should anyone pretend otherwise? This means that there will be a number of predictable and safe seats drawn to take care of the interests of both sides. The important question here is how many of these safe seats there will be.

Second, then, and here is the harder part, they should create a substantial number of “marginal” or competitive seats where either party has a clear shot at winning. In the marginal seats you create the places where public opinion and the tides of current events can have an impact in each election. These also ought to be a mixture of Downstate, Suburban, and Central City-Suburban combined districts.

Elections ought to count for something and have an immediate impact on the composition of the legislative body and on the making of public policy. If you create a number of marginal seats, they can. Otherwise, the legislators are simply selecting their people rather than the people selecting their legislators when you have too many safe seats drawn at the outset.

Finally, after this round is over, we really should have a spirited public debate and an educational exercise over ways to do this differently and better in 2020. At the very minimum, we ought to get rid of the constitutionally mandated “tie breaker” mechanism.

The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute offered and advocated for a new plan for 2010; however, it was not adopted. Other groups offered other plans also not adopted. The provision of the tie-breaker being by a “Special Master” appointed by the Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and the ranking minority party member of the court was central to our plan. There are lots of other interesting state plans, some of them new, e.g. from California and Florida, which could serve as models. We really ought to study the experience of those other states and see what we can learn and apply in Illinois. I hope we do not wait until 2018 or 2019 to have that debate again, and the PSPPI will do what we can to help lead that discourse starting in 2012.

The Roberts court, with the chief justice in the lead, is amassing a strong free speech record by refusing to carve out new exceptions to the First Amendment and by expanding the frontiers of free speech in the areas of campaign finance and hate speech.

This month’s 8-1 decision protecting the virulently anti-gay speech of the Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., is the most recent of a series of important free speech decisions by the Roberts court.

Last term the court ruled that corporations could use treasury funds to support political candidates in the weeks leading up to the election. It also threw out a federal law punishing depictions of animal cruelty. Court observers expect the court to toss out California’s law against violent video games for juveniles when it hands down its decision in that case later this year.

In fact, the chief justice and Justice Antonin Scalia are sometimes more reliable votes for strong free speech positions than justices considered more liberal, such as Justice Stephen Breyer, who has been willing to uphold government efforts to regulate campaign speech, for example.

Saint Louis University law professor Chad Flanders cautions that it may be too soon to be sure of a trend. The justices considered more liberal still are more likely to support free speech in national security and school speech cases, for example. And Flanders points out that Chief Justice Roberts took pains to stress that the funeral protest decision was narrow. “So, it’s pretty hard for me to see a trend,” he wrote in an email.

Even if conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have become more protective of free speech, their views have had little impact on conservatives in the Missouri Legislature. The day after the Supreme Court’s funeral picketing decision, the Missouri House passed a law banning protests within 500 feet of a funeral for two hours before and two hours after it occurs – a law so broad that many legal experts doubt it would be constitutional.

The vote was 142-15. One of the few opponents was freshman Rep. Rory Ellinger, D-University City. Ellinger, an unreconstructed liberal with a long association with the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “We must protect free speech that we hate.”

Liberal history

The protection of vigorous and often unappealing speech began a century ago with cases that mostly involved leftist anarchists, Communists and socialists, such as presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was thrown in jail for a stump speech supporting draft protesters.

That trend continued for the next half century when free speech cases involved loyalty oaths, obscenity, prosecution of Communist Party members, punishment of war protesters who burned their draft cards, punishment of students who protested the Vietnam war and criminal laws against those burning the American flag.

But, in recent decades, free speech issues have increasingly involved conservative speech. In the 1980s and 1990s some college campuses adopted hate speech codes to protect minorities and women from racist and sexist insults. But Justice Scalia made it clear in a cross-burning case from St. Paul that cities and campuses couldn’t protect some groups, such as blacks, while not protecting others, such as gays or union members. In other words, the government can’t pick out one side of a debate and favor it by protecting it from fighting words.

The single free speech decision that most angers many liberals is last year’s Citizens United ruling allowing corporations to use unlimited funds to support a candidate for office. The five more conservative justices on the court voted to strike down part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that prohibited election ads paid for by corporate or union funds in the weeks just before an election.

Continuity or not

Roger Goldman, a professor at Saint Louis University Law School, wonders whether today’s conservative justices would have supported the free speech decisions of half a century ago.

“I’m wondering if Roberts and the conservatives would have joined the liberals in the old First Amendment cases involving communists, loyalty oaths, obscenity, etc.,” he wrote in an email. “In other words, (I’m wondering whether) the new conservatives disagree with the old conservatives of the 40s thru the 90s.”

Two decisions from a year ago illustrate Goldman’s question. On the one hand, the court threw out a federal law against depictions of animal cruelty. The law had been aimed at a bizarre kind of pornography involving women in high heels crushing small animals. But the law was broad enough to encompass videos of dog fights and hunting, which went too far for the court. The conservatives of 40 years ago might have been more willing to uphold the law than today’s conservatives.

“I have a hard time seeing the Burger court striking down the crush video statute,” wrote Flanders.

On the other hand, the conservatives on the Roberts court turned down a free speech challenge to the federal law making it a crime to provide “material support” to a terrorist group, even if the support is legal or educational support. The more liberal justices on the court – Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor – would have ruled that the First Amendment protected the right of human rights organizations to provide legal support for a Kurdish group. Justice John Paul Stevens joined the conservatives in that decision.

Conservatives also lined up against student speech in a 2007 decision ruling that a high school student could be disciplined for holding up a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner across the street from his school as the Olympic Torch Relay passed. Chief Justice Roberts said the school could punish what it perceived to be a pro-drug message, while more liberal Justice Stevens would not have allowed the student to be disciplined.

Just as Goldman asks whether the conservatives of past decades would vote differently from today’s conservatives, his colleague Professor Joel Goldstein raises the opposite question. Justice Louis Brandeis was one of the great architects of First Amendment law in the 1920s, but Goldstein thinks Brandeis might have dissented in the funeral case.

“Brandeis wrote one of the most powerful justifications of free speech…,” Goldstein wrote in an email, “yet also believed in a right to privacy. … Although I am always skeptical of claims regarding how someone who has been dead for nearly 70 years would have reacted to contemporary circumstances, it’s hard for me to believe Brandeis would have thought a funeral was a constitutionally protected venue for speech attacking the decedent.

“…If we as a society recognize a right to privacy that goes beyond spatial confines, I would think that a funeral would rank at or near the top of experiences where the claims would be strongest. Surely someone who is grieving the loss of and burying a loved one in engaged in one of the most poignant of life’s experiences….”

Defying easy labels

Free speech cases often involve strange bedfellows. When the Supreme Court gave constitutional protection to flag-burning in the 1980s, Justices Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy joined liberals taking the strong free speech position, while the liberal Justice Stevens joined conservative Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on the other side.

The First Amendment can frustrate ideological liberals and conservatives because it is agnostic. It protects speech regardless of its ideological hue – the cross-burnings of the KKK, the Nazi march in Skokie, the anti-gay vitriol of the Rev. Phelps, the flag-burning of war protesters, the student’s black arm band protesting the Vietnam War, pornography in a person’s own home or own computer, advocacy of revolution, membership in the Communist Party.

The funeral protest is especially confounding. On the one side is the nasty religious speech of the Rev. Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church. On the other side are the dead American soldiers whose funerals are picketed.

In the Maryland case decided by the Court, the Rev. Phelps and six members of his family picketed the Catholic funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, who was killed in action in Iraq.

The Westboro Church believes that God is punishing the United States for homosexuality. The signs the church members carried read: “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “America is Doomed,” “Don’t Pray for the USA,” “Thank God for IEDs,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “Pope in Hell,” “Priests Rape Boys,” “God Hates Fags,” “You’re Going to Hell,” and “God Hates You.”

The picketers had informed the police of the protest and picketed in a public area. At one point, the funeral procession came within 200-300 feet of the picketers and Snyder’s father, Albert, said he saw the tops of their signs. Later he saw the full protest on the TV news and said it triggered a deep depression. A jury awarded $10 million for the infliction of emotional distress, an amount reduced to $5 million by the judge. An appeals court threw out the judgment, and the Supreme Court agreed.

In his decision, Roberts touched on some of the great free speech precedents of the past decades, including the flag-burning decision, the New York Times v. Sullivan libel decision and Cohen v. California, permitting a war protester to wear into a courthouse a jacket with the words “F… the Draft.”

In New York Times v. Sullivan, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. had written that the First Amendment required enough breathing space to allow news organizations to make mistakes about public officials. Chief Justice Roberts said that Westboro protesters were addressing issues of public concern and needed breathing space as well.

Just as the court had once uphold a ribald parody of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s “first time”with his mother in an outhouse, Roberts said that the Westboro protesters hyperbole was protected.

Finally, the chief justice wrote that Snyder could no more complain about the protesters invading his seclusion than could those in the courthouse who objected to the obscene criticism of the draft on Cohen’s jacket.

The chief justice concluded with some soaring rhetoric of his own. He wrote:

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

Future legislation

Missouri, which already has had two laws against funeral protests thrown out by federal court, is trying again.

Supporters of the bill that passed the House on Thursday pointed out that the decision centered on the First Amendment’s application to suits for intentional infliction of emotional distress, not on a criminal law limiting where protesters can picket.

Legislators still can pass laws that restrict the time, place and manner of funeral protests as long as they are not targeting the content of the protests and as long as the laws are not too broadly written.

The consensus of legal experts commenting on the decision online was that the courts were unlikely to uphold laws affecting an area as big as 500 feet from the funeral.

The Supreme Court has ruled that a protective bubble of 300-feet around an abortion clinic – protecting women seeking an abortion from anti-abortion protesters – was too big to comply with the First Amendment. The court is unlikely to approve a buffer around a funeral any bigger than it approves around an abortion clinic.

Where that leaves a somewhat narrower law, like the one in Illinois that sets up a 200-foot zone, remains uncertain.

I am a member of the Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation. Actually, I pay dues for my mother who is the official member in the family. Since she can no longer manage her checkbook, I take care of paying her bills. She lived far out in the country in south Arkansas, and her house is insured, at a very reasonable rate, through the Arkansas Farm Bureau. As a result of her membership, she gets a very glossy magazine published by the Farm Bureau and I now read the magazine.

I was intrigued by the last issue which included a cover article on the Farm Bureau’s legislative agenda for the Arkansas Legislature and for the Congress in Washington, D.C. After the obligatory acknowledgement that it is a time of stress on the budgets for both state and national governments, the Farm Bureau then presented a lengthy list of legislative objectives it was pursuing. Included are the usual array of farm commodity price supports, support for irrigation, renewable energy and poultry programs, and a new initiative from the Obama Administration on the development of a Biomass Crop Assistance Program to help timber farms. Each initiative had a hefty price tag.

Each one was billed as absolutely essential for the well-being of Arkansas farm families. Each one was also related to keeping or expanding jobs in the agriculture sector. No mention was made of the fact that many of these subsidies go not to the fabled American family farm, but to very large corporations who own and farm much of rural Arkansas.

I recount my adventures in farm policy because I think it illustrates some fundamental truths about the state and federal budgetary problems, the way we are likely to address them and the way interest group politics work in America. The same drama is playing out in southern Illinois in the farm sector and in a wide array of other services provided by either the state or the federal government, or both.

We have seen the threat of service cuts in subsidies for airports, and in our local region, the Williamson County Regional Airport is faced with the possibility of significant reductions which could cause us to lose the one small airline which serves our regional needs. WSIU Public Broadcasting, NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are threatened with the real prospect that their federal subsidy could be drastically reduced if not eliminated outright. They already run on-air fundraisers virtually every quarter and are seriously concerned they will not be able to make up the slack if they lose what the federal government has been providing to keep them on the air.

We have all read recently about cuts, real and threatened, to various human service agencies in our region. Cuts to those agencies which provide help and counseling for those who are addicted or who have psychological problems are just the most recent threats to their continued existence. Earlier threats to housing programs and to grants for low income people to help with their heating bills are now emanating from the federal government. Likewise the Obama Administration is suggesting reductions to the Pell Grant program which thousands of SIU and John A. Logan College students use.

The Republicans, and especially the Tea Party contingent, are in full throated rebellion against the budget deficit and demanding at least $100 billion in cuts to this fiscal year (FY2011) budget as their price for keeping the government operating. We are currently under a two week extension on the deadline for working out some compromise.

My points are two: First, these are proposed cuts to important programs which serve real people.

The rhetoric of budget cutting always refers vaguely to cutting “waste and fraud” as the magic bullet. Others have “layers of government bureaucrats” as their favorite straw man. Yet no one can really locate those miscreants so we can eliminate them and thus magically get rid of the deficit. When you get right down to it, we just don’t have all that much waste and fraud and almost all the government employees I know work hard and deliver services which are important to all of us.

In other words, we have been hoodwinked by those who tell us the cuts are easy to find and the jobs and programs easy to eliminate. Contrary to the popular myth, civilian employment in the federal government is approximately 2.7 million people and has not grown substantially since the end of World War II.

Illinois is already at the bottom of the list in terms of the number of state jobs per capita. We have dropped from 80,000 to 60,000 state employees total over the past few years. That is typical for many other states. The jobs figures for February are just out and the gains in private sector jobs are impressive, i.e. over 200,000.

But state and local government employment continues to decline. Thus, what the private sector is contributing to the very real need for new jobs is partially offset by losses on the state and local side. It will take longer to dig our way out of the Great Recession as a result.

Reducing the unemployment rate will also be greatly hampered by this loss as well as the significant loss of private sector jobs which have been outsourced over the past two decades. Most of those jobs went overseas looking for cheap labor and maximum profits for their companies and they are not likely to return. The loss of those jobs has reduced the income of both federal and state governments and has increased the demand for public services for those who have lost their jobs at home.

Second, I suspect that when it is all said and done, there will be real and significant cuts in state and federal budgets.

I also suspect that the majority of those cuts will be in the programs which serve the weak and the politically inarticulate sectors of our society. They do not give money to every congressional or legislative campaign when the candidates hold the fancy fundraisers. Often they don’t even vote. They do not have highly paid lobbyists and lawyers working for them in Springfield, Little Rock nor Washington, D.C.

The American Farm Bureau Federation is one of the best organized and most articulate interest groups in the United States, or in the State of Arkansas (or Illinois). They will probably be all right in these budget wars, and I don’t worry much about them. The Farm Bureau will take care of their constituents quite nicely. I am not so sure about a lot of other people who will never know what hit them when the budget shell explodes.

The following is an excerpt from a story Bill Freivogel wrote for the St. Louis Beacon.

The Justice Department obtained the credit reports, credit card statements, personal bank records, travel records and telephone call information for New York Times reporter James Risen during its espionage investigation of St. Louisan Jeffrey Sterling, according to a recent court filing.

The disclosure is the latest indication of the unusual tactics used by the government in the prosecution of Sterling, a former CIA agent who once accused the agency of racial discrimination and later allegedly leaked information about a botched intelligence operation directed at Iran’s nuclear program.

Justice Department rules discourage the use of prosecutorial power in a way that “impairs a reporter’s responsibility to cover as broadly as possible controversial public issues.” The rules normally require the approval of top Justice Department officials before prosecutors obtain a reporter’s personal phone records. The same requirement normally applies before prosecutors can call an attorney for a defendant such as Sterling before a grand jury. The purpose of the rules is to protect freedom of the press and the lawyer-client relationship.

CONTINUED AT THE ST. LOUIS BEACON >>

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan deserves credit for offering a little candor when it comes to the state budget mess in Illinois. He sounded Churchillian when he warned his colleagues recently that they “can’t kick the can down the road any further” on issues like unemployment benefits, health care for retired state workers and pensions.

“We’re all familiar with the inadequate funding of the state pension systems, he said. “Again, tough decision making, telling people you’re not going to get everything you thought you were going to get, telling people you may have to pay in more. Not easy stuff. So we better get ready for it.”

Madigan even suggested current workers may have to pay more and that their benefits could be reduced.

“You’ve already changed it going forward” for new state workers. “But now we are working on bills that would change it midstream. A state worker would be told, “All right, you have a state benefit package up to today. Starting tomorrow, it’s going to be a different deal.”

That brought a strong objection from public employee unions and from some lawmakers who said pensions are an unbreakable contract and the state constitution protects them from changes in midstream.

That may be, but Madigan deserves credit for offering his colleagues and the people of Illinois some straight talk about the depth of the financial problems ahead. Some folks think just because lawmakers raised taxes that it’s time to spend again and that’s not true.

A lot of additional cutting and tax increasing is ahead. For one thing, Illinois still owes over $8 billion in unpaid bills to people and groups who’ve provided services to the state but who’ve not been paid. The state is a deadbeat. But by consolidating loans, administration experts believe the state could reduce total interest and penalties by paying its bill on time. Consolidation might also provide a bump to the economy by injecting some needed cash into it.

It’s only common sense but enough lawmakers want to see cuts in future spending before they’ll agree to this idea and have stalled the idea.

Lawmakers also have to decide on making changes to a workers compensation system many feel costs taxpayers too much. Then there are issues like raising the cigarette tax, expanding the list of things subject to the sales tax, taxing pension income and expanding gambling – all to raise revenue to close the state’s budget deficit. And, they have to decide how they’ll make the state’s contribution to pension systems to put them back on a sound footing. As he said: “tough stuff.”

Yes, you can blame Mike Madigan for part of the state’s budget problems. After all, he was speaker when those bad budgets were passed. But you have to give him credit now for at least saying it’s time now for a different course – and a little backbone – from his colleagues. And, you have to admire his courage for standing up to some of the very groups that have supported Democratic legislative candidates in the past.

Democrats generally don’t run for office to make budget cuts and raise taxes. They run for office because they believe an activist government is needed to solve problems. But for now, they not going to get to do much of that. Instead, they’ve been dealt a bad hand. They’ve been put in charge at a time when Illinois faces the biggest budget crises its history. You don’t have to agree with what Madigan wants to do to say it’s refreshing to see an influential leader like him stand up and say it’s time for some hard choices.

The tragic events that took place in Tucson, Ariz., last month gave me pause and sadly brought me back to discussions I had with mental health experts during my tenure as Illinois’ Secretary for Health and Human Services regarding the need for a comprehensive strategy relating to mental health.

Mental health funding and true insurance parity necessary to provide a seamless system of care for the mentally ill took a back seat to a host of other issues during the national health care debate and Illinois is considering cutting $100 million from the Department of Human Service’s fiscal year 2011 budget. But funding mental health generally only attracts the broader society’s attention in the aftermath of a significant event in which mental health played a causal or contributing role.

Our lawmakers can legislate whatever they deem necessary, but you cannot legislate away mental illness. These are the people in our midst who are the most vulnerable and who need the most help. The need for recognition and identification of youth with mental health problems has weighed heavily on my mind since the Arizona shootings.

With the looming structural deficit, comprehensive solutions are the only ones that appear capable of delivering the desired treatment outcomes while effectively making best use of scarce resources. The cuts Illinois faces represent a challenge for all agencies and programs, including social services. Long-delayed revenue generation measures have left the state failing to keep up with inflation and rising demand.

Social programs and agencies across this country are seeing and feeling the effects of the recession. It is inevitable that, despite the importance of many critical programs, all levels and areas of state government are going to see substantial cuts.

Yet one of the steps that need to be taken to improve services for children and youth with mental illness is to improve early recognition and appropriate identification of the mental health disorders in children within all systems serving children. Unfortunately, mental health has not been at the center of the health care debate since the tenure of U. S. Surgeon General David Satcher, who went on the record as the first Surgeon General to issue a report on mental health and mental illness.

“There is no health, without mental health,” he said at the time.

Satcher received a great deal of support for several key pieces of legislation. Then-U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici also put a spotlight on mental health and attempted to provide needed funding. Domenici and the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone pushed for parity in insurance coverage for mental health and addiction issues. The Paul Wellstone-Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 became law and requires health plans to cover treatment for mental illness on the same terms and conditions as other medical treatments. The law also forbids insurance companies from imposing higher cost-sharing rules, deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses on mental health services and treatments.

Still, state mental health parity laws vary considerably; thus there is much work needed to erase the disparate coverage of mental health and physical health conditions by insurance companies.

Statistics released in 2006 by the U.S. Department of Justice showed approximately half of all state and federal prisoners now show signs of mental illnesses ranging from depression to bipolar disorder and other serious mood conditions. These prisoners create strain on the system because they have a heightened need for mental health care. Yet federal and state spending lags far behind the need. In light of funding challenges, there is a value in early detection and treatment of mental illness rather than use scarce resources on costly incarceration after the fact.

The terrible shooting that left six dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life showed the important role mental health care services play in a community. Almost immediately, along with expressions of condolences for the loss of life, the nation turned its attention to gun control legislation, political extremism in public discourse and the impact of coarsening public debate on the so-called “lone wolf” gunman.

As the finger pointing lessens, issues surrounding the mental health of the accused gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, are beginning to take center stage. Bizarre images and writings authored by Loughner have surfaced online in which he outlines his political and social views. These postings along with commentary from classmates, school officials and others appear to be the product of someone who might be suffering from mental health issues.

The likelihood of mental illness on the part of the gunman, once again puts mental health squarely in the public eye. Any renewed focus on mental health must include a comprehensive approach to service delivery, funding and early detection if it is to be effective. The stresses caused by economic recession, dislocation and other challenges place strains on fragile individuals in our society and any combination of events can serve to push someone past their ability to cope. In addition, it is reported that returning troops are suffering increased instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and brain trauma. Budget cuts and social stigma also play a contributing role in preventing individuals from getting treatment.

As I look back on my days as Secretary of Human Services working diligently on mental health policy and funding issues, stigma was a major deterrent to individuals and families seeking assistance with mental illness and often stood in the way of meaningful funding and policy reforms for mental health despite the objective evidence that treating mental illness is not only possible but cost effective in the long-term. The solutions to the challenges of mental health care are a matter of public policy that requires a holistic approach incorporating health care providers, supportive service delivery systems, legislators, insurers, patients’ advocacy groups and community-based organizations and others with a stake in this issue.