Robert Thomas, chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court but once a Notre Dame and Chicago Bears placekicker–a man used to cheering multitudes–has caused consternation in the courts he oversees in his pursuit of an insolent columnist.
Page’s columns claimed Thomas had played a big behind-the-scenes role in disciplining the Kane County state’s attorney at the time, Meg Gorecki. In 1998, two years before she ran for office, Gorecki had left a message on an acquaintance’s answering machine suggesting a quid pro quo: a county job in return for a contribution to the campaign fund of the county board chairman, Mike McCoy. “A dumb thing to do,” wrote Page. The tape surfaced three weeks before the 2000 Republican primary, in which Gorecki was challenging the incumbent state’s attorney. She went on to win the office, but afterward the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission investigated the answering-machine episode and eventually recommended a two-month suspension of her law license. It was up to the supreme court in 2003 to decide what the penalty should be, and Page wrote that Thomas–from the next county over, Du Page, and familiar with the players–had an agenda. Thomas, “a Republican party heavyweight” allied politically with Gorecki’s opponent, was “pushing hard for very severe sanctions–including disbarment,” Page wrote, while the other six justices preferred lighter sentences. In the end, Gorecki lost her license for four months. Why? “Ah, yes. Politics,” Page wrote in his third column. “The four-month suspension is, in effect, the result of a little political shimmy-shammy. In return for some high profile Gorecki supporters endorsing Bob Spence, a judicial candidate favored by Thomas, he agreed to the four-month suspension.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Let me back up. Page had accused Thomas of a “little political shimmy-shammy.” (What’s shimmy-shammy? I asked Power. “A little magic,” he explained. “He worked his magic.”) Page hadn’t been able to get Thomas’s suit dismissed on the grounds that a columnist gets to call a politician a shimmy-shammier. Now he’d lost the battle to ask the other justices if any shimmy-shammying went on behind the closed doors of the supreme court. Appellate judge Thomas Hoffman grandiloquently described the occasion he was rising to: “The judiciary, as a co-equal branch of government, supreme within its own assigned area of constitutional duties, is being asked to exercise its inherent authority to protect the integrity of its own decision-making process.”
“A good question,” he said. “There is no backup supreme court.” Even so, “it’s not a matter we created, and I’m not sure it’s incumbent on us to make a suggestion.” He went on, “Justice Thomas has the answer–which is to dismiss the case.”
Thomas’s lawyer, Joseph Power, agreed. “They don’t have a right to depose the supreme court or their clerks, so that’s been decided. That’s a done deal,” he told O’Brien. “Now they can do Justice Thomas, they can do our experts, they can do the fact witnesses . . . and they could have done that a long time ago. But they wanted to delay, delay, delay.”
Tribune headline, February 1: “Setback for lupus therapy”
