When Jones leaves office, he will be allowed to take with him $577,605.04 from his campaign fund, which he can roll into his own bank account. That doesn’t violate Illinois ethics laws, either.

We can leave it to a Chicago ethicist to explain how Jones’s contributors have not in fact been paying bribes for all these years, but at least we know why it happened. Under the grandfather provisions of a landmark 1998 Illinois ethics law, Jones will be able to keep that money for his own personal use — the same amount of money his account contained on June 30, 1998, minus income taxes. As it happens, that provision was part of a famed ethics bill for which Senator Obama sometimes takes credit, wildly exaggerating his role in its passage. As Jones’s story demonstrates, Obama’s supporters are also exaggerating the law’s positive effects.

		Steyn: The Superbower Blase: A Medicaid Buy-Off Sanders: Blanche Lincoln’s Balancing Act Costa: Saturday Night Fever Miller: The Man Who Would Kill Lincoln Hibbs: Just Bite Her Already Goldberg: We Need Your Help Spruiell: Welcome to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Editors: End It, Don’t Amend It Goldberg: Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later Murdock: Medicare: A Glimpse of the Future? Krauthammer: Travesty in New York Charen: Holder’s True Motive Lowry: Barack Obama’s Chump Diplomacy Spakovsky: Criminalizing Health-Care Freedom Anderson: Roadmap to Victory

This ethics bill — which passed in a not-so-close 52-4 vote in the Illinois senate — did not clean up Illinois politics. It did at least bar political fundraising on state property. It blocked lobbyists and contractors from giving personal gifts to legislators. But it did not stop them from giving contributions in the so-called “pay-to-play” game. It did not prevent major political donors like Tony Rezko from influencing the makeup of the powerful boards that control the state’s pension funds, filling them with crooked allies who would help him steal. It did not prevent incumbent legislators from rolling campaign funds into their personal bank accounts.

When the 1998 law passed the state senate on May 22, 1998, it set off a mad dash for incumbent legislators to fill their coffers as quickly as possible, so as to maximize the amount in their accounts on the grandfather date. According to the Chicago Tribune, State Rep. Monique Davis (D.) went so far as to lend her campaign $33,000 five days before the deadline. The campaign of state Sen. George Shadid (D.) borrowed $50,000.

Obama cannot be blamed for any of this because he did not write this 1998 ethics law. In fact, he had very little to do with it until the day it passed. He was not the one to propose the ethics bill in the Illinois senate. He was not even a cosponsor until the day it passed. Five months after the ethics bill was introduced, and more than one month after it reached the senate, Obama was invited by Emil Jones to become its chief Democratic cosponsor. As David Mendell writes in Obama: From Promise to Power, former Rep. Abner Mikva convinced Jones to let Obama handle the legislation. Sen. Dick Klemm (D.) was removed as chief cosponsor and replaced by Obama on May 22, 1998 — the very day the bill passed.

Jones would never have allowed a tough ethics bill to pass. His expected $578,000 retirement package is fitting because it will end a long career he has spent enriching himself in the business of government. Jones’s entire family has somehow made its way onto the government payroll. The Chicago Sun-Times reported last July that his son, Emil Jones III, does not have a college degree, but obtained an unadvertised $57,000 job with the Illinois Department of Commerce. The hire was made shortly after Senator Jones agreed to back Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s (D.) budget plan. The younger Jones is expected to succeed his father in his senate seat.

Jones’s stepson, John Sterling, owns a technology firm called Synch-Solutions, which received a contract for $700,000 of work for the state budget office in 2007. In that same year, the Chicago Sun-Times found that the company had “a $3.5 million contract from the Chicago Aviation Department, a $1.2 million contract from the cash-strapped Chicago Transit Authority and another $1.2 million from the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority . . . [and] a separate $3 million subcontract through Chicago's public schools.”

In 2005, Governor Blagojevich rescinded the requirement that the director of mental health at the state’s Department of Human Services be a medical doctor. This allowed Jones’s wife, Lorrie, to take the position, with a salary of $186,000 — an $80,000 raise over her previous salary.

That was not enough money for Jones, whom the Sun-Times found earlier this year was giving himself interest-free loans out of his campaign fund.

Jones is an old ward-heeler who got his start in Chicago politics in 1960, when Democrats were digging up entire cemeteries to get out the vote for JFK. With his sham 1998 ethics bill, he protected his own nest-egg and can now retire comfortably.

And in the process, he made Barack Obama look just a bit like a reformer. If you don’t look too closely, that is.

— David Freddoso is an NRO staff reporter.

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