Paper pushers could go mad trying to figure out how much of each cafeteria pizza can trace its origins to the Land of Lincoln. To be fair, Rep. Harper isn’t suggesting anyone solve such an equation.

It’s very easy to argue that young children facing accusations that would warrant detention are far more likely to have their lives set on a new course if kept out of institutional punitive settings.

In Gideon, Justice Hugo Black described the “noble ideal (of) fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law.”

In Illinois, the first Earth Day in 1970 was celebrated from the largest cities to the smallest towns, especially in schools, as thousands of the state’s schoolchildren took the day to learn to help the planet.  

Voters often feel isolated from Washington, D.C., and Springfield. Math and distance make it inevitable. Being cut off from local officials is a choice, one we need not make.

School districts should conduct the most thorough background checks available when hiring new employees, columnist Tom Weitzel mantains

The working theory seems to be protecting earnest homeschoolers from red tape intended to entangle those who simply pull their kids from class and ignore them, or worse, but that raises two concerns.

Rigid belief in the infallibility of police, prosecutors, judges, juries and sentencing laws from the last millennium allows the inference that everyone serving a life sentence fully deserved that punishment and is nominally human but otherwise irredeemable.

Government is an ongoing process and sometimes the governor’s signature is only a blip in the long timeline of impact.