A Judge Wrote an OpEd. The Illinois Supreme Court Decided He Was Too Dangerous to Hear Traffic Cases.
Issue No. 18 | June 2026
On December 11, 2025, Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice P. Scott Neville Jr. signed an order recalling seven retired circuit court judges to part-time service. One of them was James R. Brown, who spent eighteen years on the Cook County bench before retiring in 2020. The assignment was traffic court. The term ran through December 7, 2026. The authority cited was Article VI, Section 15 of the Illinois Constitution, which lets the high court bring back retired judges to clear backlogs (Illinois Courts, Injustice Watch).
Brown showed up. For six weeks he heard traffic cases. There were no complaints from litigants. No complaints from lawyers in his courtroom. No accusations of bias on the bench. Nothing.
Then, on January 26, 2026, at 6:30 in the morning, Cook County Chief Judge Charles Beach sent Brown a text message. The Illinois Supreme Court had just issued a one-sentence order vacating his assignment. No hearing. No notice. No referral to the Illinois Courts Commission, which is the body the state constitution actually created to discipline judges. One sentence (Injustice Watch, Liberty Justice Center).
What had Brown done in those six weeks to earn a summary removal? Nothing. The trigger was a column he had written four months earlier, in September 2025, on a small news site, before he had even applied for recall. The column was conservative. The court did not like it. So they took his robe (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).
What the Centercratic Party Stands For
The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Two of them describe exactly what the Illinois Supreme Court just did, and what the rest of us are now obligated to defend.
The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” The Illinois Constitution creates a specific body, the Illinois Courts Commission, to handle complaints about judges. That body holds hearings, takes evidence, and lets the accused respond. None of that happened to Judge Brown. The same court that is supposed to defend due process pulled his assignment in one sentence, in the dark, without ever telling him what he had done wrong. And as we will see, two sitting justices of that same court ran openly partisan campaigns, took millions from a sitting Democratic governor, and then refused to recuse themselves from cases involving that governor’s signature laws. One law for the retired conservative. A very different law for the partisan justices already on the bench (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).
The fifth reads: “Debate with Facts and Dignity. Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.” A retired judge wrote a column. People disagreed with the column. The proper response was to write a column back. Instead, the Cook County Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers filed letters with the Illinois Supreme Court asking that he be removed for what he had written. Not for anything he had said on the bench. For an op-ed. The high court complied. That is not a debate. That is a punishment for speech, dressed up in robes (Chicago Council of Lawyers, CWB Chicago).
Two principles. One judge. One column. One state’s judicial branch coordinating against a retired man because they did not like an essay he posted on a website almost nobody reads.
The Column, the Letters, and the Order
Here is what the public record now shows.
On September 5, 2025, Judge Brown published a column titled “His Judgement Cometh and That Right Soon” on johnkassnews.com, a small Chicago opinion site run by the former Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. The column criticized progressive prosecutors by name, defended the Trump administration’s federal law-enforcement actions, and used heated language about Soros-funded district attorneys, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Kim Foxx, and the question of biological men in women’s sports. It was, plainly, a conservative opinion column. Brown signed it with his name. He was retired. He held no judicial office at the time (johnkassnews.com, Injustice Watch).
Three months later, on December 11, 2025, the Illinois Supreme Court recalled him to traffic court. Six other retired judges were recalled the same day. No bar group objected to any of them (Illinois Courts).
On December 29, 2025, the Cook County Bar Association, the nation’s oldest Black bar association, issued a press release demanding the high court reverse the recall. On January 5, 2026, the Chicago Council of Lawyers followed with an open letter to all seven Illinois Supreme Court justices. Both letters cited the column. Both letters argued that Brown’s published views disqualified him from hearing traffic cases (Chicago Council of Lawyers, Injustice Watch).
On January 26, 2026, three weeks after the second letter, the Illinois Supreme Court, which currently sits five Democrats to two Republicans, issued the one-sentence order vacating Brown’s assignment. No hearing was held. No findings were made. No notice was given. Brown learned about it from a text message at 6:30 in the morning (Ballotpedia, Injustice Watch).
On February 18, 2026, Brown filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Illinois Supreme Court justices, Brown v. Neville et al., case number 1:26-cv-01825 in the Northern District of Illinois. He is represented by the Liberty Justice Center. The complaint alleges First Amendment retaliation, viewpoint discrimination, and a due process violation (Liberty Justice Center, Federal complaint).
On June 1, 2026, a federal judge rejected the Illinois Supreme Court’s motion to dismiss. The federal court found that Brown is “likely to succeed on his due process claim.” The Illinois high court’s argument that it could remove a recalled judge for any reason or no reason, without any process at all, was rejected on the merits at the earliest possible stage (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).
Three Judges the Court Will Not Touch
Now consider what the Illinois Supreme Court does not punish.
Start with the cleanest comparison. Judge Ramon Ocasio III is a sitting Cook County circuit judge. He has written publicly on racial justice, on the Civil Rights Act, and on mass deportations. He is on the bench right now. He has not been removed. There has been no letter from the Cook County Bar Association or the Chicago Council of Lawyers. There has been no one-sentence order at 6:30 in the morning. He is a sitting judge with a published record of political opinion writing, and the Illinois Supreme Court has done nothing about it. The only difference between Judge Ocasio and Judge Brown is the direction the opinions point. That is the textbook definition of viewpoint discrimination, and it is the basis of Brown’s federal lawsuit (Wall Street Journal).
Now move up to the high court itself. Two of the five Democratic justices who run that court, Elizabeth M. Rochford and Mary K. O’Brien, were elected in 2022 after openly partisan campaigns. Both accepted millions of dollars in campaign donations from Democratic Governor JB Pritzker. Both trumpeted endorsements from Democratic politicians and left-wing activist groups. They did this while the court was preparing to hear a constitutional challenge to the state’s ban on so-called assault weapons and a challenge to Pritzker’s signature criminal justice reform abolishing cash bail. When the gun ban challengers asked them to recuse, both refused. They sat on the cases that had been funded, in effect, by the same governor whose laws were on trial (Legal Newsline).
In September 2023, Justice Rochford went one step further. She spoke at a political fundraiser in Lake County in her official capacity as a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. The fundraiser benefited the Lake County Women’s Political Action Committee, a group that exists, in its own words, to elect female Democratic candidates. The Illinois Code of Judicial Conduct, in Rule 4.1, expressly prohibits judges from publicly endorsing or speaking on behalf of political candidates or organizations. Rochford did it anyway. Her defense was that “the content of my speech was not political in any way.” The Cook County Bar Association did not issue a statement. The Chicago Council of Lawyers did not issue a statement. No public action was taken by judicial regulators (Legal Newsline).
So here is the rule the Illinois Supreme Court is now operating under. A retired conservative judge writes a private-citizen op-ed and is summarily removed from traffic court by one-sentence order with no hearing. A sitting circuit judge writes political columns from the left and stays on the bench, untouched. Two sitting Democratic justices take millions from the governor, refuse to recuse on his marquee cases, and speak at partisan fundraisers in their official judicial capacity. The bar associations stay silent. The high court protects its own.
Brown received the unanimous endorsement of every single bar association in Cook County, including the same two bar groups that just demanded his removal, at his last retention election in 2014. Nothing about the man changed between 2014 and 2026. What changed was the column (Liberty Justice Center, Kass interview).
Once Again
This is the kind of story that exposes both parties at once.
Democrats will tell you, accurately, that judges have to be careful about public speech and that retired judges writing inflammatory columns invite legitimate questions about their fitness for recall. They will be correct, in the abstract. Then they will not say the next sentence, which is that the very same standard, applied honestly, would have forced Rochford and O’Brien off the gun ban cases and pulled Rochford out of that Lake County fundraiser. Their own party will not call it what it is, because the high court is delivering political outcomes the party likes.
Republicans will tell you, accurately, that this is viewpoint discrimination and that a state high court cannot punish a judge for an op-ed without due process. They will be correct. Then they will spend the next six months turning Judge Brown into a culture-war martyr on conservative cable, fundraising off him, and using the case to attack every Democratic-elected judge in the country. They will not spend much time asking why, when Republican-controlled high courts pull similar moves against liberal judges in red states, the principle of independent courts always seems to be situational.
Once again, our parties have failed us. One side will not police its own high court. The other side will turn a genuine constitutional violation into a partisan trophy and discredit the underlying principle in the process. The result is the same in either case: independent courts get weaker, due process gets thinner, and the next state’s high court is already drafting the next one-sentence order against the next judge who wrote the wrong column.
This is exactly the gap a centrist party is supposed to fill. Centercrats are the people who can say two true things at the same time. Judges should hold themselves to high standards of public restraint, and that standard has to apply to the partisan-fundraiser justice on the bench just as much as it applies to the retired judge with an op-ed. A state supreme court has broad authority to manage judicial assignments, and that authority does not extend to summary removal for protected speech with no hearing. Both statements have to be on the page at the same time, or the country gets nowhere. The two-party system purposely avoids putting them there.
We have to save our democracy before it is too late. A retired American judge wrote one column on a small website almost nobody reads, and his own state’s highest court took his robe in a one-sentence order in the dark. A federal court has already ruled he is likely to win his due process claim. The state high court could have referred the matter to the Illinois Courts Commission and held a hearing. Instead they sent a text message at 6:30 in the morning. If five justices can erase a judge for an op-ed while two of their own colleagues sit on cases bankrolled by the governor, that is not an independent judiciary. That is a political branch in a robe.
That is the wave.
The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com