Denver — “[E]thics reforms means getting officials to limit gifts to themselves.” Those are the words of Emil Jones, president of the Illinois senate, in his speech at the Democratic Convention Monday.

Jones would know. He is Barack Obama’s political mentor, and he can now give himself a $578,000 gift. It is a perfectly legal and completely corrupt arrangement that he made ten years ago, with just a little help from Obama.

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If you listen to Barack Obama’s supporters, you might get the impression that the presumptive Democratic nominee did something to reform Illinois when he served there. Sometimes they mention Obama’s involvement in a 1998 ethics bill. They probably won’t mention that the law they are discussing could soon make Jones a wealthy man. Such stories do not fit the image of the bipartisan reformer that Obama’s campaign has spent millions of dollars projecting.

At the Saddleback Forum two weeks ago, Obama was asked to name one time when he had acted against his own or his party’s interests for the good of the nation. He responded by citing his work with John McCain on ethics reform — work that in fact never occurred. The two men never did work together on ethics reform — in fact they clashed in a nasty exchange of letters over the issue after meeting once to discuss it. Obama’s fictional answer to this question was revealing, given that the entire premise of his campaign is his alleged commitment to bipartisan reform.

Some of Obama’s supporters assert that he did at least reform Illinois’s ethics laws. You can judge for yourself what kind of ethics laws govern Illinois today by looking at what people can get away with.

Monday we explored how Senator Obama and his staff helped obtain $320,000 in state grants for Robert Blackwell Jr. — a political donor and client of Obama’s private law practice. Blackwell had just paid Obama $112,000 in retainer fees when the grant money started coming in, and he went on to be a large Obama donor. Somehow, When Obama wrote a letter for his private law client to receive a grant, he was not violating Illinois ethics laws.

When Obama tried to hide the obvious conflict of interest by burying Blackwell’s companies on his senate disclosure forms, amid a list of hundreds of his firm’s law clients, he was not violating Illinois ethics laws.

When Obama failed to mention in those forms that Blackwell had paid a majority of his income in 2001, and was not just any old client, Obama was not breaking Illinois ethics laws.

Obama’s aide, Dan Shomon was working part-time for Obama and part-time for Blackwell, the beneficiary of the grants he helped obtain. Apparently, that did not violate Illinois ethics laws, either.

Perhaps you are getting an impression of Illinois ethics laws — weak, toothless, easy to bend, and impossible to break. That is true. And it’s not even the half of it.

Emil Jones caused a splash here this week when witnesses saw him call a fellow convention-goer an “Uncle Tom” for supporting Hillary Clinton. But if anyone would bother to read Chicago’s excellent newspapers, they would discover that the real splash came last week, when Jones announced his upcoming retirement from public service.


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