Illinois Policy Review reports:
Today the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously struck down Senate Bill 1, the pension-reform law former Gov. Pat Quinn signed in 2013. The act’s modest reforms to government workers’ pension benefits would have reduced annual increases in retirees’ benefits, raised the retirement age for younger government workers and put a (generous) cap on pensionable salaries.
The court ruled that even those relatively minor changes violate the state constitution’s pension clause, which says that “[m]embership in a pension or retirement system of the State . . . shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”
The court rejected the state’s argument that its police powers allowed it to make those changes to avoid the fiscal and economic disaster that will occur if the state cannot bring its pension costs under control. The pension clause doesn’t include any exceptions, the court said, so there are no exceptions.
What about the possibility that pension spending could crowd out spending on core state services related to public safety? The court explicitly considered this and said, in effect, too bad: the law is the law.
Supreme Court justices are rarely, if ever, so strict when private citizens’ constitutional rights are at stake.
Whether we like it or not, the courts generally do not consider any constitutional right to be absolute. Free speech, gun rights, the right to earn a living – state and local governments can violate all of these if the courts think they have a good enough reason, and they often do.
So today’s decision on pension rights essentially means that, in Illinois, government employees’ “right” to ever-increasing pension benefits gets stronger protection than any constitutional right the rest of us have.
The conflict between taxpayers and tax consumers is
is as we've warned five years ago:
In the coming years, the war between those who pay taxes and those who receive them will only increase. It could be college students who feel they are entitled to pay tuitions cheaper than grammar school tuitions or government workers who can retire at 42 instead of 65. Taxation without representation has long been a powerful rallying cry in America. In the near future, we may be hearing a derivative of that famous slogan: no representation without taxation. Many are beginning to question whether low taxes are possible with government workers allowed to vote.
Just a reminder.
