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205 22. The Final Year Although I was not seeking reelection in 1992, I remained committed to the belief that public service is the highest of callings. Along with dealing with a new governor in 1991, we faced a worsening economy. As a result, the state was falling short of projected revenues. We had to be creative to make up the budget deficit since our normal reliance on natural revenue growth from income taxes and sales taxes, our largest sources of revenue, was in jeopardy. Illinois was losing jobs in addition to losing revenue. The Illinois Economic and Fiscal Commission reported a loss of 238,000 Illinois jobs, seasonally adjusted, from early 1990 to late 1991.1 The commission also said that Illinois would lag behind the nation in recovering from the recession. In short, all the economic news seemed bad, and the state’s reduction of services and funding for poor people bothered me a lot. Then came another blow on September 5, 1991: Secretary of State George Ryan pulled the name of Al Jourdan out of a crystal bowl. Jourdan was the Republican Party’s state chairman. The name of a Democrat was also in the bowl, but it no longer mattered. It was a redistricting year, and we went through the whole routine that had been so favorable to the Democrats in 1981. When Jourdan’s name was drawn, the map victory went to the Republicans in 1991. They would create new districts that would be effective for the elections of 1992. Everybody would have to run for election or reelection in all 118 House districts and all fifty-nine Senate districts, including my new one. That presented two problems for me. In the new district maps, the Republicans gave parts of Oak Park to three Senate districts and four House districts. Obviously, that could be confusing to voters. I had represented the Eighth District, but the new Fourth Senate District in which I lived included precincts that had been part of Senator Earlean Collins’s the final year 206 district. My second problem was that the new maps gave Republicans a good chance of taking majority control of the Illinois Senate after the 1992 elections. We had been in the majority since 1975. I knew I would not like being in the minority after serving as the Senate president for fourteen years, and that was assuming I would get reelected in whatever district I found myself. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but the map became a major factor in helping me decide. After twenty years, I had this feeling that we were no longer making the kind of progress that I wanted to make in the General Assembly. The economy and the budget were in trouble again, and funding for the poor and disadvantaged was in danger under Governor Edgar. I determined I had had enough and rather quietly decided that I would not run for reelection. It was time to let somebody else try. That did not mean I was finished with politics, though. It was interesting how my career was on some path that paralleled the career of William Clark, my first boss when he had been the attorney general. Clark had become an Illinois Supreme Court justice in 1976 and announced in December 1991 that he was stepping down. I knew ahead of time that his announcement was coming. In Illinois, we elect the seven supreme court justices. Three are in the First District, which is just Cook County. The other four are in districts covering the rest of the state. With Clark and me being from Cook County, I thought it was my turn to try for one of those seats. My name had come up previously for the supreme court. So after Clark’s announcement, my name was floating around before I even put it out there. I received a great deal of support from the legal community and labor leaders and started putting together a strategy to get the campaign documents filed. Then, sitting at my kitchen table one December evening with all the paperwork in front of me, Sheila and I talked it over, and I finally just said: “What am I doing? I’m not doing this.” That is how and where I decided not to run for the supreme court or any other office in 1992. I never filed the paperwork. Instead, on December 12, 1991, I issued a statement that, frankly...

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