Fortner bill would restrain independent candidacies

In his farewell message from the presidency, George Washington, the father of our country, issued a warning that has been all but ignored in the decades since. A noble and uncommon visionary, Washington feared the rise of partisan politics and saw political parties as looming threats to republican democracy.

“However (political parties) may now and then answer popular ends,” he said in 1796, “they are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

He further admonished that “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public counsels and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”

We are reminded of Washington’s observations as we consider a bill that has cropped up in the Illinois General Assembly that would weaken the already heavily handicapped ability of independents or fringe-party candidates to seek or win elective office. HB 2009, sponsored in the House by Republican Mike Fortner of West Chicago and co-sponsored by Republican Sidney Mathias of Buffalo Grove, is aimed at strengthening a party’s control over its primaries.

That, in itself, is an understandable enough goal; we have no quarrel on its face with the notion that parties want their candidates to be nominated by their party voters. But this bill has greater implications. It would bar anyone who voted in a primary from then running as an independent in the following general election.

In other words, had it been in effect, John B. Anderson of Rockford would have been unable to run as an independent for president in 1980 after failing to win the Republican nomination earlier in the year.

We think there’s something seriously wrong with that limitation. We think government should encourage greater independence, not less.

We don’t know that we would go so far as Washington and decry the very existence of political parties, but we do recognize a lack of control over our party politics — how parties pressure their members to fall in line, how parties are conflicted in matters of the public good by their own ambitions for success and survival, how the strident partisanship of our times is corrosive to the republic rather than constructive.

We oppose the limitations of HB 2009 and call for the legislation to be amended or rejected.