Got all that?

House Joint Resolution 93 “creates the Joint Commission on Ethics and Lobbying Reform to review and make recommendations for changes to the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act, the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act, the Lobbyist Registration Act, the Public Officers Prohibited Activities Act and Article 50 of the Illinois Procurement Code.”

Although the House voted 111-4 in favor, Senate Republicans pulled support en masse, and it passed only 32-18 with nine abstentions. The sticking point was the makeup of the 16-member panel:�The party leaders in each chamber would name two members apiece. The governor would appoint four people, no more than two from their own party, the likely result being six members from each political party. The remaining four members would be the inspector generals from the offices of the attorney general and secretary of state, with one other appointee from each office.

The current attorney general and secretary of state are Democrats. In their opposition, Republicans said the appointees from those offices would be inherently political, tilting the balance 10-6 to the left. The implication is that no one works for a state office who isn’t concerned primarily with their personal voting preference, or at the least that whichever plausibly apolitical civil servant gets named to the commission would ultimately only be a proxy vote for their politician boss.

Both inspector generals, Diane Saltoun in the attorney general’s office and Jim Burns from the secretary of state, are indeed Democrats, but they also have backgrounds in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, including work on political corruption cases. Saltoun was a prosecutor in that office for 13 years, whereas Burns was the appointed attorney. While there in the 1990s he targeted Cook County Democrats with such veracity and efficacy that his 1988 gubernatorial primary bid tanked. He’s been in his current job for nearly 20 years.

Senate Republicans did make a good faith amendment — which didn’t get a hearing — that would’ve corrected this perceived imbalance by keeping the state office employees but stripping them of voting power on the commission. While that seems a decent compromise, it’s also a questionable hill on which to die.

The task force wouldn’t be a binding body, it would just make recommendations to the Legislature, where voters statewide decided to tip the balance to the left. Nothing prevents lawmakers from introducing their own bills based on what the ethics panel discusses, even if the panel doesn’t find a policy worthy of advancing.

In fact, there’s nothing stopping lawmakers from introducing their own reform measures directly, such as closing the procedural loophole exposed by the shoddy records of the campaign committee for current Auditor General Frank Mautino. Despite clear knowledge of that problem, lawmakers don’t seem inclined to propose solutions.

Another option is scrapping the appointment process for legislative vacancies in favor of special elections. That would of course cost more money, borne by the taxpayers of the counties that would administer such elections. But it also would ensure voters directly choose their General Assembly representatives and end the practice of members essentially selecting their replacements, regardless of if they leave office under a cloud of controversy, as was the case with recently resigned state Rep. Luis Arroyo.

Republicans appear to be making a principled stand. They might do well to sidestep legislative colleagues and go straight to Gov. JB Pritzker, who seems to be the most vocal Democrat about cleaning up Springfield. At this point, the last people trustworthy on the matter are the lawmakers themselves, which makes the resistance to appointees from outside the Legislature that much more confusing.

This task force, regardless of composition, already appears to be a sufficient distraction from the direct business of tightening ethics laws. Statehouse confusion seems a feature of the system, not a bug, and nothing that happened last week serves to prove otherwise.

SCOTT T. HOLLAND is a former associate editor of The Times who continues to contribute his column plus help with editing and writing. He can be reached at newsroom@mywebtimes.com, facebook.com/salmagundi or twitter.com/sth749.�