For several days over the past few weeks, dozens of people have been led into a room in Chicago’s Loop, where they’ve been asked whether they opposed people being “politicians for life.”
Many of them did. They either raised their hands or argued that career politicians “lose touch with reality” and lack fresh perspectives demanded by changing times. Occasionally, their answers seemed to reference President Joe Biden. At others, the U.S. Supreme Court.
This was not some political focus group, even though the presidential election is less than a month away. Rather, it was jury selection in the racketeering conspiracy trial of ex-Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, one of the most powerful Democrats in Illinois history.
Opening statements in Madigan’s federal trial are likely to begin next week — jury selection is crawling along, with one more juror needed to fill out a 12-member panel, and six alternates still to be chosen. The trial will then be ongoing as Americans head out to vote either for former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
That timing has led to an interesting, if imperfect, snapshot of the electorate as attorneys search for jurors. None of the evidence in the case relates to present-day politics, but Madigan’s attorneys want to know how people might react to Madigan’s own political biography — including his record-setting 36 years as speaker of the Illinois House.
Hence the question, should someone be a “politician for life?”
“Sometimes it appears that the people that are in office for a long time lose touch with reality,” said one woman, who identified herself as a teacher with grandchildren and aging parents. “And they don’t always look at the viewpoint of everyone. They look at the viewpoint of ‘I want to stay in this office.’”
A man who spends his weekdays teaching at Ball State University in Indiana, but calls Chicago’s 48th Ward his home, said the question sent his mind straight to “the issue of Supreme Court justices,” who serve for life.
He said there’s “just a lot of negative energy around Supreme Court appointments in recent years. And it’s very stressful just hearing about it.”
Another man, who served six years in the Air Force, said, “I think with time, views change. Age definitely changes people. Everything’s changing around us. It’s good to have fresh people in higher power.”
That man said he held that opinion even though he doesn’t follow politics closely enough to name Illinois’ governor or its senators.
A woman born in Evergreen Park said that, “ideally, politicians would not be there for life.” She said, “we’ve recently had a lot of issues” where career politicians “maybe have become senile by now.” But, she added, “how do you tell people you can’t vote for them?”
Still, a man who worked for the Illinois Senate in Springfield during the 1990s had a different point of view. He said he met a lot of people there “that were amazing at what they did.”
“I believe that there is a place for someone who knows how it all works,” he said.
This is all a somewhat skewed picture, though. Most people were only asked to talk about this issue after they raised their hand early in the process, signaling an objection to the concept. Not all potential jurors were asked the same questions in public.
Their identities are confidential. Only the names of people who serve on the jury will be released when the trial is over.
Meanwhile, dozens of additional candidates were not even interviewed in public. Some were tossed from the jury pool after signaling some kind of “animus” toward Madigan or politicians in general, prosecutors said.
The pool was drawn from the eastern division of the Northern District of Illinois, which reaches as far west as La Salle County. Chicago hosted this year’s Democratic National Convention, but Illinois is a reliably Democratic state, so it has not been targeted by Trump and Harris.
The top national news stories this summer have included debate over whether Biden, 81 and a Democrat, should have run for a second term, as well as controversial decisions by the Supreme Court, where justices nominated by Republican presidents are in the majority.
But many potential jurors said they barely follow the news. The Ball State professor said he reads the news, but not every day. The teacher with grandchildren and aging parents acknowledged seeing news about Madigan but said she didn’t necessarily trust it.
“Why would I believe that somebody portrayed on the news is dishonest because they say so?” she said.
One particularly unusual trait stood out among members of the jury pool, though. Many said they wanted to serve on Madigan’s jury, because jury duty is an “honor.”
One woman with a doctorate in human physiology from the University of Calcutta in India called it “an opportunity of a lifetime.”
Another, a musical theater actress, said she’d never served on a jury before. She called it a “pretty big honor to be able to do that for your country.”
And, she said, “I want to make my mom proud.”