Between profiting from his elected office and serving as a political hit man for Toni Preckwinkle, Robert Martwick is a busy man
With perhaps few exceptions, there is no better example of corruption in Toni Preckwinkle’s Cook County Democratic Party machine than State Senator Robert Martwick. Representing the state’s 10th District in Springfield since 2019, Martwick is now seeking a soft landing on the Cook County bench with a starting salary — as determined by the legislature — of $234,000. A seat on the Cook County courts will help double Martwick’s taxpayer funded salary, boost his pension, and add to the fortune he has amassed through his tax assessment grift. It is a virtual certainty Boss Preckwinkle’s request to place Martwick on the bench, largely because Martwick has so loyally served as a stooge for the Cook County Board president and a shill for Stacy Davis Gates.
A man with a history of obsequious toadying, Martwick recently made himself useful to Preckwinkle in the race for Clerk of the Circuit Court. During the Democratic nomination process for the 2024 election, Preckwinkle’s nemesis, incumbent Clerk Iris Martinez, had accumulated sufficient votes to be slated by Cook County Democrats. Ahead of the vote, Preckwinkle deviously changed the slating process and stripped elected committeemen of their power to vote for potential candidates. Instead, she created “Selection Committees” and stacked the deck with her loyal sycophants, most notably, Rob Martwick.
A moderate Democrat with no ties to Preckwinkle’s political machine, Ms. Martinez defeated Preckwinkle’s preferred candidate, Michael Cabonargi. An electoral victory that enraged Preckwinkle, Martinez further incensed the County Board president by overhauling the Clerk’s office and providing transparency regarding the dysfunctional court system and county government that Preckwinkle oversees.
Ahead of the vote, Preckwinkle changed the process and stripped elected committeemen of their power to vote for potential candidates. Instead, Preckwinkle created “Selection Committees” and stacked the deck with her loyal sycophants, most notably, Rob Martwick. Silencing the voices of the elected representatives of their districts is not exactly considered “democratic.”
Though Martwick is a practicing attorney, and his own law firm brings cases before the tax appeals board — the Cook County Board of Review — Preckwinkle placed Martwick on every committee she created, including the committees that select judges, from the Circuit Court bench all the way up to the Illinois Supreme Court. In this role, Martwick has extensive influence over the selection of Board of Review Commissioners and judges that his law practice profits from.
To reward Martwick for his loyalty, the Democratic Party recently handed out a contract to a “design and printing” company owned by the 10th District senator, which received over $100,000 in just one month. Only in Preckwinkle’s machine can this level of corruption be so prevalent.
A grateful Martwick then returned the favor to Preckwinkle for the committee seats, thanking the Board president by engineering the slating of millionairess Mariyana Spyropoulos, a super-donor to Preckinkle’s party, for Circuit Court Clerk over incumbent Iris Martinez.
His work in the service of Preckwinkle incomplete, Martwick then viciously attacked then-candidate for Cook County State’s Attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, at the August 2023 Cook County Democratic Committee meeting on candidate endorsements for Cook County State’s Attorney. As Judge Eileen O’Neill Burke, then a candidate for State’s Attorney, took questions, Martwick harassed Burke on her campaign treasurer's history of casting ballots for Republicans in a third-rate attempt to taint the lifelong Democrat as a MAGA Republican.
Several years prior to serving as a political assassin targeting O’Neill Burke and Martinez, Martwick infamously ambushed then mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot at a press conference, criticizing Lightfoot for her opposition to a bill he sponsored that would have let the Preckwinkle-controlled Cook County Board of Commissioners have the power to appoint the Cook County Assessor. Despite his attempted takedown of Lightfoot, candidate Lightfoot went on to crush Toni Preckwinkle in all 50 wards.
Attacking women, especially women of color, is Martwick’s specialty. In the 2024 election cycle, this time on behalf of the CTU, Martwick attacked independent candidates for Chicago’s elected school board. As the elections heated up, Martwick lent his name to mailers and text messages fabricated by the CTU falsely claiming independent candidates for the Board of Education were linked to Donald Trump, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and nameless out-of-state billionaires. Many of the candidates for the Board of Education were minorities and mothers, who sought office hoping to bring needed change to the Martwick-designed, discredited school board system.
In another underhanded move, Martwick sponsored the disastrous school board legislation for Stacy Davis Gates, which was amended after Brandon Johnson’s mayoral win to allow Johnson to be able to select the majority of members. The chaos that has ensued between Johnson’s board and CEO Pedro Martinez has been a national disgrace and another public embarrassment for Chicago.
A resident of Chicago’s Northwest Side, Martwick represents an area heavily populated by first responders and workers across city government. Yet, as head of the State’s Pension Committee, he has allowed for years of severe underfunding of pension funds. For the entirety of his term as Chair of both the House and Senate Pension committees, public workers in the Prairie State have had the worst-funded public pension system in the nation. With Martwick at the helm, state workers' pension funds debt has exploded from $94.5 billion in 2012 to $145.6 billion in 2023.
Martwick chaired the pensions committees during a period of economic prosperity and booming financial markets. Why, then, are pensions in such bad shape?
As chair of the State Pension Committee, Martwick allowed legislators to approve budget after budget that did not meet the pension funds’ actuarial recommendations to keep the pensions afloat. Years of fiscal mismanagement and underfunding, after the billions of COVID-relief funds are long-gone, may lead to the future insolvency of the state pension funds.
Instead of fixing these critical issues, Martwick recently returned to do the bidding of controversial Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates and downstate union leaders who wanted to “fix” the Tier 2 pensions by essentially eliminating the tier altogether. While Tier 2 is in need of a fix, what is unaddressed is the fact a public employee beginning a career in a firehouse or in a school in Illinois today is paying into a bankrupt system, which is more unjust than any provision in the current law.
After years of underfunding, this legislation would have pushed the entire pension system into bankruptcy. Martwick was clearly looking for union support by playing to their anger over Tier 2, but without offering any ideas on how to finance these enhancements, this legislation would have cost taxpayers an estimated $30 billion. First, Martwick wanted to defund the police, and now he has essentially defunded their pensions.
Meanwhile, Mayor Johnson and the CTU cannot agree on their next lucrative contract, the firefighters do not have a contract or functional equipment, and the police are grossly understaffed.
A serial liar, Rob Martwick, has recently accused this author of pushing the pension holidays that led to a drop in the pensions’ funding ratios even though I have never voted for a budget at either the city or state level. The fact remains that when I left the City of Chicago as the head of the budget office, municipal workers’ pension funding levels were above 90 percent. Furthermore, at the time I left government, city laborers had enough assets to cover 133 percent of their liabilities and police and fire pensions, which had been traditionally underfunded, hovered around 70 percent. During my tenure as Chicago Public Schools’ CEO, the pension funding level rose from 80 percent to 104 percent.
Most importantly, I was working in New Orleans rebuilding their school district after Hurricane Katrina when the legislators irresponsibly voted to take pension holidays.
Senator Martwick has been quite comfortable feeding his gullible audiences comforting fictions about his record in order to buff his public image and achieve reelection. However, I will not allow him to rewrite immutable facts, falsify events, or minimize the decisive role he has played in leaving. Nor will I allow him to distort my record in bringing security to Chicago’s public pensions.
Somehow, Senator Martwick continues to represent thousands of teachers, firefighters, police, and others in public service. They should know that as member of the General Assembly and Cook County Committeeman, he has taken a taxpayer-funded salary, made millions on tax appeals for corporate clients, received contracts from the Democratic Party for printing services, underfunded the public pension system, and has attacked women, repeatedly.
This level of corruption is why Chicago and Illinois remain a universal laughingstock.
Only voters can decide to remove a Senator, Committeeperson, and perhaps prevent a Judge Martwick from presiding over a courtroom. But do not also forget to hold the person responsible who sponsors this triple-dealing corruption, Party Boss and County Board President, Toni Preckwinkle.
