G-Rod back under the
microscope
For years, the governor
and his top aides have claimed that politics never touches state hiring.
They swore up and down
that they follow the law whenever they fill mid-to-low-level civil service
positions, and claimed they don't even know the names of the people who were
applying for the jobs.
This was a crucial point
because the governor imposed a hiring freeze right after he took office.
Because of this, all new hires have to be approved by his office. The publicly
offered rationale for the freeze was that the governor wanted to make sure that
the positions were actually needed during a budget crisis when every penny
matters.
Hiring freezes are often
used as political devices to make sure that only the "right" people
are put on the payroll. If you've got a guy who worked on the campaign and is
qualified as a truck driver and you've got an opening for a driver, you might
fill that position before you fill other openings where you may not have any
qualified political workers.
The governor steadfastly
maintained that wasn't how things were done in his office, however. All hires
are "blind," meaning they look only at the job openings that they
absolutely had to fill and the qualifications of the applicants, not the actual
names.
But then the Associated
Press turned up a list last week of 1,800 hires from 2003, and 1,200 of them
included the names of the applicants.
The explanation? The
Blagojevich administration immediately fell back on an old standby: Blame
George Ryan.
The governor's office
claimed they were using George Ryan's old hiring forms, and those forms
included a spot for the names. No explanation was offered for why Blagojevich
and his top people maintained for years afterwards that nobody knew the names
of applicants when, in reality, the names were clearly visible on most of the
hiring lists.
The next day, however, the
AP discovered that the Blagojevich administration's own revised form still
included the name of the applicants. Oops.
Besides the fact that the
governor was apparently not being completely forthright when he said that names
were not looked at when many names were known (and AP's sources also claim
names were discussed in personnel meetings), the AP story is important because
the governor's personnel office is under investigation by the FBI for its
hiring practices.
So, if they filled
nonpolitical, protected positions based on who the applicants were instead of
their qualifications and the budgetary and governmental need to fill the slots,
then in the current hostile prosecutorial environment they've got big trouble,
campers. Big, big trouble. Why? Because if they used the names, then it was
most likely because they were screening the applicants for political
connections. And you aren't allowed to use politics when filling civil service
jobs.
Right after Blagojevich
won his election there was enormous pressure from legislators, county chairmen,
ward and township committeemen and everybody who ever thought of him or herself
as a "party leader" to put their people on the state payroll. The
Democrats had been locked out of the governor's office for so many years that
the relatively small handful of political hires the governor was allowed to
make couldn't possibly slake the tremendous thirst.
Sources have claimed all
along that several rules (particularly the state's veterans preference
provisions) have been bent, or even outright broken, in an attempt to placate
the scads of swells who helped put the governor into office. That's one reason
why we've seen politically connected 40-somethings hired as interns, then
bumped up to full-time jobs without having to go through the normal hiring
procedures. That is most likely legal. But the crusading US Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald has his own ideas of what is and isn't allowed.
There's almost no question
that some lines were crossed in the governor's administration. The big question
now is whether the behavior was flagrant enough that the US Attorney decides to
act before the November election. Ten years ago, nobody would have batted an
eyelash at any of this stuff. But Patrick Fitzgerald wasn't around ten years
ago.
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Rich Miller also
publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter. He can be reached at
thecapitolfaxblog.com