“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” — H. L. Mencken

Congratulations, fellow Chicagoland residents! After several phony apocalypses and halfway harbingers of doom, we all actually might genuinely be screwed this time. We have earned it.

That’s because the SAFE-T Act, passed in 2021 by the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature under Governor J. B. Pritzker in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, has been upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court. The act included, most notoriously among its provisions, the nation’s first-ever statewide “cashless bail” law. “Cashless bail” is one of those things that works, much like Communism, only in theory: Instead of money, it is a judicial determination of flight risk and danger that governs release from prison once arrested for a crime. In practice, it means scenes such as the ones seen in every city where it has been attempted whether officially or informally via prosecutorial discretion. (The organized-shoplifting rings of America’s coastal cities hopefully date their formative charters to the time “Defund The Police” started trending hard in the mainstream media.)

So the Democratic hammerlock supermajority in the Illinois state legislature, in its infinite wisdom, decided to ask Chesa Boudin to hold their collective beer and pass a law that previously had only been experimented with on a municipality level, but this time do it statewide. As a state, Illinois is of course entirely anchored population-wise by one city, that of Chicago and its suburbs. Thankfully, crime is not an issue here.

Now the court has upheld the law and decreed it will go into effect on September 18, 2023. And why not? It is impossible for me to express deeply enough how terrible an idea this law is, in an era where Chicago is experiencing a massive surge in street crime and gun crime while accompanied by the attendant demoralization of a Chicago Police Department that frankly brought this on itself. Context matters, too: Chicago also just recently narrowly elected Mayor Brandon Johnson, who branded himself as a “Defund the Police”-lite candidate during a campaign against a safe law-and-order Democrat and won.

But the court’s decision was a valid one. The legislature passed a stupid, iniquitous, and outright civically dangerous law — but a constitutional one. It is not the place of the state supreme court to overturn it merely because subsequent sobriety makes many in the world of electoral politics (Democratic electoral politics, mind you) quietly wish they would wave a magic wand and disappear a disastrous bender of competitively escalatory virtue-signaling with a single opinion, sparing them the consequences of their intoxicated reverie. I honestly wish I found the dissent by the Illinois supreme court’s two lonely Republican-appointed justices convincing as to their reading of an otherwise unenumerated and unenforced provision of the state Constitution, but alas. This was Illinois’s elected legislature, acting in all its majesty and folly, within the legitimate lawmaking powers granted to it.

I have written in the past about how much I hate seeing conservatives use Illinois in general and Chicago in particular as a cruel punchline. “Why don’t you move to Texas/Florida/Tucker’s shack in Maine?” is not much of an answer to a person whose place here has as much to do with family as anything else, and whose love for the city’s great qualities exists independent of that.

In the strictest sense, however — one which my own logic commands — this is a case where the residents of Illinois have gotten precisely the government that they voted for. (I didn’t, but keep in mind that as a Chicagoan I live in a congressional district that voted 12 percent Republican in 2020.) Even were Illinois’s legislative districts not gerrymandered by the Democratic Party into power-maximizing boundary lines that look like polydactyl amphibians, this still remains a land that gave Joe Biden nearly 60 percent of the vote statewide in 2020.

In a world where politics has been reduced to brand names and personalities over policy and practice, Illinois clearly seems to know at least what it is not, and that is Republican. (This was helped immeasurably by the behavior of the once notoriously corrupt — and now simply deranged in its irrelevance — statewide GOP.) It is about to get whatever that currently means to the activist Democrats writing the state’s agenda, regardless of whether they wanted it or not, good and hard. Understood in that light, the Illinois supreme court made the right call in respecting the legislature as acting in accordance with expressed will of the voters. Vox populi, vox dei, and may God help us all.