CHICAGO - The Illinois Senate unanimously voted 59 to 0 to remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office for abusing his power, following a four-day impeachment trial during which senators heard what they described as "damning" evidence that he broke the law and sought to trade jobs, legislation, and President Obama's Senate seat for personal gain.
The Senate also then voted unanimously to permanently bar the 52-year-old Democrat from holding future state office. Lieut. Gov. Pat Quinn, 60, was expected to be immediately sworn into office as the new governor. The state's struggling economy and $2 billion budget deficit will top his agenda as he takes the reins of state government.
Blagojevich, Illinois' 40th governor, is the first in the state's history to be convicted of impeachment and removed from office. The Senate has 59 members, made up of 37 Democrats and 22 Republicans. A two-thirds vote, or 40 senators, was needed to oust the governor.
The vote capped a four-day trial begun on Monday and led by Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Fitzgerald that came after the House's overwhelming vote last month to impeach the governor for 13 alleged cases of misconduct or abuses of power, including the federal government's pay-to-play charges and accusations that he attempted to auction off Obama's Senate seat.
Those charges led to his arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in early December and sparked the legislative effort to remove him from office. The charges also accuse the governor of abuses during his six-year tenure involving governing issues, the issuance of state leases, controversial initiatives, and questionable hiring and spending practices.
Over the course of the trial, senators heard from state officials such as auditor general William Holland alleging that the governor disregarded state and federal laws in some actions such as his efforts to secure flu vaccines outside the country.
FBI agent Daniel Cain, who authored the 76-page affidavit that accompanied the federal government's criminal complaint, testified as to the validity of the tape recordings captured by the government. Senators were allowed to hear excerpts of one in which the governor sought to extract campaign contributions from a horse racing industry official in exchange for legislation that favored the industry.
"The governor showed a complete and utter contempt for the law," chief prosecutor and House majority lawyer David Ellis said in his closing argument, calling the governor unfit to govern.
The vote came after senators rose one after another to condemn the governor for the pay-to-play allegations leveled against him and after Blagojevich, who had boycotted the trial along with his attorneys, offered up an impassioned plea in which he asserted he had done nothing wrong and should be allowed to remain in office.
"I have done absolutely nothing wrong. I've followed every law," Blagojevich told senators, as he defended his actions as being driven by the public interest. "You haven't proven a crime."
The governor also challenged the rules of the trial, which did not allow either him or Ellis to call witnesses linked to the looming federal criminal case. "How can you throw a governor out of office who is clamoring and begging and pleading with you to give him a chance to bring witnesses in to prove his innocence? ... Let me make my case."
Many senators said in support of their vote that the state could move forward to deal with its challenges - most notably a growing $2 billion budget deficit - only by removing the governor. The impeachment documents gave significant weight to the financial impact of the corruption scandal, including the recent credit downgrades that were partially attributed to the governor's arrest and the challenges the downgrade poses to the state's resolution of its budget crisis.
Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Chenoa, charged that the governor had "essentially paralyzed our state government. Rod Blagojevich has hurt the economy of local communities ... Rod Blagojevich has actually hurt real people."
Officials have recently warned that what had been estimated to be a $2 billion deficit in the fiscal 2009 and 2010 budgets could double. State revenues continued their downward slide through the end of 2008, according to the quarterly report from Comptroller Daniel Hynes.
The state closed out the calendar year with a backlog of $1.844 billion in bills, down from $4 billion a few months earlier thanks to the distribution of $1.4 billion from a short-term borrowing last month.
Fitch Ratings downgraded Illinois to state to AA-minus last month. Standard & Poor's put the state's AA rating on negative CreditWatch. Moody's Investors Service has not acted on the state's Aa3 rating, but did strip it of top short-term credit marks.
The governor will likely face federal indictment on the criminal corruption charges by April.
