Writing frequently about Illinois government presents a concerning amount of opportunities to leaf through the personal archives, copy an old paragraph or two, change a few nouns and present the information as new.

Consider a headline from December 2020: “Evenly split committees increasingly likely to result in anything but deadlock.”

The subject then was a House Special Investigating Committee considering “Speaker Michael Madigan’s role in a Commonwealth Edison bribery scandal, which concluded its business Monday afternoon by doing effectively nothing.”

Per House rules, the committee had three Democrats and three Republicans. The Capitol News Illinois report on the final meeting was entirely predictable and even more stark in hindsight: “The House Democratic members – state Reps. Chr

See Full Page