Lou Lang about Michael Madigan: “I wouldn’t do anything to damage my speaker... He’s been very good to me.”

While we are waiting for the corruption trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan to begin we get to watch a preview - the trial of Madigan associates and executives from Com Ed on federal bribery charges.

You can read about the trial here.

Former state rep Lou Lang was on the stand yesterday.

Lang once represented Skokie, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, and portions of neighboring Chicago.

He served as Democratic committeeman for the Niles Township Democratic Organization, Executive Vice Chairman for the Cook County Democratic Party.

In other words, a pretty powerful guy.

But what the federal prosecutors wanted to show by putting him on the stand was that like so many in the Illinois state legislature during the three decades that Michael Madigan was the boss, Lang was just a gofer.

Not much more than a bagman, a delivery boy.

My only contact with Lang was when I served on the local recommendation committee of IPACE, the Illinois Education Association’s political action committee.

It was a decade ago, shortly after Madigan passed and Democratic Governor Pat Quinn signed the bill which would have stolen our teacher pension.

It was only because the Illinois Supreme Court ruled the action unconstitutional that our pensions were made secure.

The job of our local IPACE recommendation committee was to vote thumbs up or thumbs down on local politicians running in our region of the IEA. For us that would be the near north suburbs and the far north side of Chicago.

Each candidate who wanted our union’s endorsement had to come before us and make their case.

It was a rare incumbent that didn’t receive an IEA recommendation, Democrat or Republican.

IEA leaders had made incumbency a basis for endorsement.

But our local committee had agreed beforehand that we would not recommend any state legislator that had voted for pension theft.

And all the legislators in our area had done what Boss Madigan had told them to do and voted as they were told.

Including Lou Lang.

When we voted against recommending Lang he went ballistic.

Not because he needed the IEA’s money. It was more like, how dare we?

“The problem is,” Lang screamed at us while waving his finger, “you haven’t given us enough Democrats!”

Like now, this was at a time when the Democrats had veto proof majorities in both houses of the General Assembly and had the governor’s mansion.

Lang went on to be accused of sexual harassment in a #MeToo case.

The charges were later dismissed, but he was forced to resign from his leadership positions after Madigan lost confidence in him.

It was reported that another woman was ready to come forward with similar charges.

If the prosecutors are out to prove that nothing in Springfield happened without Madigan’s say so, including taking Com Ed’s bribes, than they couldn’t have picked a better guy to take the witness stand than Lou Lang.

And there was at least one year that my union didn’t recommend him.

I’m kind of proud of that.