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“Ah, yes. Politics,” Page wrote by way of explanation. “The four-month suspension is, in effect, the result of a little political shimmy-shammy. In return for some high profile Gorecki supporters endorsing Bob Spence, a judicial candidate favored by Thomas, he agreed to the four-month suspension.”
Thomas sued for defamation. He said that that “shimmy-shammy,” if true, was the kind of thing that would have gotten him indicted for official misconduct. Last November a Kane County jury ruled for Thomas and awarded him $7 million in damages. Bruce Sanford, a famous First Amendment lawyer from Washington, D.C., was promptly hired to lead the appeal.
There’s a “we’ve just begun to fight” panache to all this. Paragraph two calls Thomas’s lawsuit a “constitutional cancer.” Page two says it has “compromised the independence and integrity of the Illinois judicial system from top to bottom.” The suit immediately goes on to say, “Within weeks of the filing of Chief Justice Thomas’s complaint in 2004, the procedural ‘shimmy-shammy’ that has come to define the case was already well underway.” Thomas’s own suit is now being offered as evidence that Bill Page had his number all along.
