State Rep. Robert Rita has a strange take on government employment. When news broke that Senate President Emil (I Need a Raise) Jones was trying to hand his seat over to his son, Emil III, Rita’s justification was:

“Give him a chance to prove himself.”

Astonishing. Yet, odds are that Chicago and Democratic voters, if given the chance, would elect Emil Jones III to succeed his father. Demonstrating again that they are gratified to be led by the nose by a political system that is more akin to an oligarchy than a republic. Naturally, Rita would jump to defend such a system, in that he, like so many others, is a beneficiary of the system. His father, John, is the longtime Calumet Township Democratic committeeman.

Perhaps there’s no other person qualified in Jones’ South Side district to fill father Emil’s shoes. Of course, Emil the Younger’s credentials are impeccable, being a payroller in the administration of the Emil the Elder’s political ally, Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Perhaps when I’m ready to retire I should tell my bosses that I want my son to succeed me as a column writer so that he has “a chance to prove himself.” Only in government, especially in Chicago and Illinois government, would such an argument not be laughed out of the room.

When will Chicago and Democratic voters finally get sick and tired of being laughed at by the likes of the two Emils? And the Daleys, Strogers, Madigans, Cullertons, Burkes, Mells, Lipinksis, Steeles, Hynes, Jacksons, Austins, Laurinos, McAuliffes, Jacobs, Demuzios, Mautinos and so forths. Sure, a few have turned out okay, such as state Comptroller Dan Hynes, son of former Cook County Assessor and 19th Ward Committeeman Thomas Hynes. But for every Dan Hynes, there is a clutch of Todd Strogers to give nepotism a deservedly bad name.

Well, the response will be, if the voters of his district want Emil, the prince in waiting, who outside of his district has a right to object? After all, he represents them, not the rest of us. That argument would be fine if they would elect him to be the district’s dogcatcher. But as a member of the state Legislature (not to mention senate president), what Emil the Elder does affects the entire state. Emil the Elder was Rod (of the House of Mell) Blagojevich’s strongest ally in the governor’s assorted shenanigans, mischiefs and monkeyshines. Jones has done more than his share to cast Illinois down into such desperate financial shape that if I were Jones, I’d want to get out of town myself.

Apparently, Jones’ supporters district don’t mind rewarding him for all these accomplishments.

As the Sun-Times notes:

“As one of the longest-serving members of the General Assembly, Jones also is positioned for a healthy pension. If he does not take any other state positions and retires at the end of his term in January, he would begin drawing a state pension of $81,016 annually. A year later, he would see that total increase by 48 percent because he would be grandfathered in under an otherwise defunct retirement formula that rewarded service beyond 20 years.

The boost for Jones, who has served in the General Assembly 35 years, would take his pension all the way up to $119,903 a year. That’s nearly 26 percent more than the $95,313 he is now being paid to wield the Senate gavel. It’s also more than double the median amount that two households in his Senate district earn combined, according to 2000 Census data.”

You’d think that the voters in his district might just be a little upset that they have larded Jones’ pockets so well, at their expense. Here I’m not even going into the various deals that Jones has engineered off the books, such as the one that lagged a company owned by Jones’ stepson, John Sterling, $700,000 as a subcontractor on a government-streamlining contract. Or the fact that with his son in the Senate Emil the Elder still will be in position to reap the insider’s harvest.
When will it dawn on people who vote for the likes of Jones to come to understand that he’s taking them for a ride? What would it take to stop voting for folks who are obviously so much more enamored with self-aggrandizement than they are devoted to the public interest? When will they come to understand that they are saps?

Here’s one such sap. He posted this to my blog after I suggested that the insiders’ selection of Todd Stroger to replace his late father John Stroger as Cook County Board President was nepotism run amok:

“You know nothing of what Todd Stroger would do as Board President. Go ahead, say it out loud. You don’t know a thing. Tony Peraica [a Republican presidential contender] is anti-pro-choice and negative on many women’s issues, anti-gay, and trots out minorities when it is convenient. The only thing anyone in the Peraica camp can count on is public ignorance. You know a little bit about that, don’t you, Dennis? The whole “anything is better than Todd” mantra. Of course, you are painfully wrong. Oddly enough, I did not see you type a thing about Todd’s plans, platform, position or anything of the like. It was just the same anti-Dem rant…. The argument is tired and non-sensical. Just like the logic you employed to make it.”

It didn’t take genius to figure out that Todd the Younger would blow it. Voters such as this writer gave the untested Todd “a chance to prove himself,” and now we have a county whose dismal financial condition rivals that of the Democratic-controlled state. In response, I’ve suggested that what Illinois might need is term limits, but now I’m not so sure; many voters are so dense that we’d just get an endlessly rotating succession of family members to fill the job of the politician whose term has expired.

A few weeks ago, Tribune columnist John Kass reported that David Ochal, the mayor’s now-former first deputy commissioner of aviation, managed to get a Commonwealth Edison generator delivered to his home from O’Hare Airport during an extended storm-related power failure. His neighbors didn’t much like being in the dark while Ochal got favorable treatment, so they ratted him out. It happened before when Ochal built, without proper building permits, a pool into his backyard that ended up flooding the neighbors’ yards. What’s interesting is the fact that many of Ochal’s neighbors were described as city and government employees, so they knew “how the game is played.” Gosh, I thought, maybe now they know how the rest of us feel about favoritism, and might understand some of the problems caused by their support of the political machine. But I doubt it; next election, I bet they vote the same way, for the same family hacks.

There’s some irony in the way so many voters (Republicans aren’t exempt, witness the Bush father-son presidencies) are content to live under a hereditary aristocracy. Democrats generally can be relied on to favor “death taxes” under the mistaken belief that in a democracy it’s somehow unfair for a parent to pass wealth on to their children. But when it comes to passing a political office on to the progeny like a family heirloom, Democrats seem to have no problem at all.