Ethnicity, experience take center stage in first faceoff of Illinois Supreme Court candidates

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Joy Cunningham on Thursday said “race has been injected” into the Democratic primary contest for a seat on the high court by her opponent, state Appellate Judge Jesse Reyes.

“While I think it’s very interesting and distracting to inject race into the race, no pun intended, I think it’s really important to look at the credentials, to look at the experience,” Cunningham said during a candidate forum hosted by the Union League Club of Chicago and the Chicago Bar Association.

And when it comes to experience, Cunningham said, “I am the best candidate because I’m already doing the job and doing it well.”

But Reyes argued that ethnicity is important in the race because no Latino has ever sat on the state’s highest court.

“I don’t know if it’s so much race,” Reyes said. “I think what it’s about is about voice, diversity and inclusion.”

Cunningham, who was appointed to a vacant Supreme Court seat in 2022, and Reyes, an appellate judge since 2012, are vying for their party’s nomination for a 10-year term filling one of Cook County’s three seats on the court. No Republican candidates filed to run in the GOP primary, so the winner of the March 19 Democratic primary likely will be unopposed on the November general election.

The contest between Cunningham, who is Black and has the backing of the Cook County Democratic Party, and Reyes, who is Latino, has become a flashpoint in the long-smoldering tensions between those key blocs in the Democratic coalition, and it comes as the county’s Latino population is on the rise and the Black population is declining.

Beyond their disagreements over the role racial and ethnic identity should play in the contest, there were few major points of contention between the veteran jurists during the roughly hourlong forum, moderated by WGN-TV political analyst Paul Lisnek.

Both candidates spoke repeatedly of the role Illinois government has played in protecting access to abortion and other reproductive health services after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 struck down the federal right to abortion conferred by its earlier ruling in Roe v. Wade.

Cunningham argued that state courts are more important than ever as the federal courts kick abortion and other contentious issues back to the states.

“We have become the gatekeepers of all of the rights that we hold dear,” she said.

Reyes said “we’re very fortunate in Illinois to have a legislature and governor and court system that works to provide protection for people’s rights — reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights.”

They were less forthcoming on another key issue, gun rights. Neither candidate would go into specifics when Lisnek asked what guidance they might offer the state legislature’s Democratic supermajority about how far they could go in enacting restrictions on firearms without infringing on the right to bear arms.

If the legislature did attempt to “push the envelope on a certain issue, like the Second Amendment,” Reyes said, justices would communicate that through their rulings.

For her part, Cunningham noted her vote with the majority in the high court’s 4-3 ruling in August that upheld the state’s ban on certain high-powered guns and high-capacity ammunition magazines. But that opinion, written by fellow Democratic Justice Elizabeth Rochford, explicitly did not make any determination on whether the law violates the Second Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month declined to take up the case on appeal.

Regardless of the outcome of the primary, the state Supreme Court’s 5-2 Democratic advantage over Republicans is unlikely to change.

The only other Supreme Court race on ballot this year is in the 4th Judicial District, which encompasses 41 counties in central and northwest Illinois. Appointed Republican Justice Lisa Holder White is running unopposed in the GOP primary.

With the Cook County Democrats backing Cunningham, Reyes faces an uphill battle, which is reflected in the disparity between their two campaign funds.

Cunningham ended 2023 with nearly $286,000 in her campaign fund after raising more than $141,000 and spending nearly $167,000 from October through December, state campaign finance records show. She’s since raised another $76,000 in contributions of $1,000 or more.

Reyes enter the new year with more than $117,000 in his campaign fund, having raised more than $157,000 and spent more than $79,000 in the final three months of 2023, records show. He’s reported raising only $2,000 so far in 2024.

Reyes, whose father immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico City, worked in the city corporation counsel’s office in the 1980s under Mayor Harold Washington and then at Chicago Public Schools before becoming an associate judge in Cook County in 1997.

He was later elected to the circuit court bench and in 2012 to the 1st District Appellate Court, making him the first Latino justice elected to an Illinois appeals court.

He grew up in Pilsen and worked his way through college at the University of Illinois at Chicago and law school at John Marshall.

Reyes sought the backing of Cook County Democrats for a Supreme Court seat four years ago, when he was passed over in favor of another appointed incumbent, Justice P. Scott Neville Jr., who is Black. Reyes wound up finishing second, behind Neville, in a seven-person primary.

Cunningham, who was an appellate judge from 2006 until her elevation to the Supreme Court in 2022 to replace retiring Justice Anne Burke, previously was an associate judge in Cook County and an attorney in private practice, including a stint as general counsel for Northwestern Memorial Healthcare in the early 2000s.

She began her legal career in the Illinois attorney general’s office after getting her law degree at John Marshall. She earned her undergraduate degree at the City University of New York.

In 2012, she ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for the state Supreme Court seat now held by Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis.

dpetrella@chicagotribune.com