Category: Blue States
Pritzker sides with criminals once again, signing controversial ‘Clean Slate’ bill into law
Despite an appalling violent crime problem in Chicago, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has signed a bill protecting convicts, making it easier for them to get past hiring filters and find jobs in Illinois.
On Saturday, Pritzker signed the Clean Slate Act, which will enable officials to seal non-violent criminal records for over 1.7 million people in Illinois, Fox 32 Chicago reported.
Just last month, Gov. Pritzker fortified the state’s sanctuary laws.
The new law will require eligible records to be sealed by 2029.
The law applies only to non-violent convictions and dismissed or reversed charges and arrests. More serious crimes, such as sexual violence, DUI, or any crimes that require sex offender registration, are not eligible for automatic sealing.
While this particular law excludes violent felonies, it comes at a time when violent incidents on Chicago trains are making national headlines.
Moreover Pritzker has a long history of siding with suspected law-breakers over victims. In 2023, cashless bail became the law of the state, thanks to the SAFE-T Act he signed previously. Just last month, he fortified the state’s sanctuary laws, prohibiting federal immigration agents from conducting operations near courthouses, hospitals, university campuses, and day-care centers.
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The Clean Slate Act is celebrated by the Democrats as a jobs initiative, since many businesses use background checks to filter out candidates with prior convictions. Once the records are sealed, that traditional filter will be less robust, allowing potential former convicts to remain in the running.
“There is no reasonable public safety justification for making it hard for returning citizens to get a job or housing or an education,” Pritzker said, according to Fox 32. “It’s a policy guided by punishment rather than rehabilitation.”
The Clean Slate Initiative lists Pennsylvania, Utah, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Delaware, Virginia, California, Oklahoma, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York as states that have passed legislation that meets their criteria for Clean Slate laws. Washington, D.C., is also listed.
The criteria include automation of record sealing, including arrest and misdemeanor records. The Clean Slate Initiative also includes a “strong recommendation for laws to include eligibility of at least one felony record.”
Sheena Meade, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative, stated: “Our coalition partners — including Live Free Illinois, the Illinois Coalition to End Permanent Punishments, the Workers Center for Racial Justice, Impact for Equity, and Code for America — and bill sponsors Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth and Sen. Elgie Sims have shown the resolve, persistence, and heart needed to drive real change.”
The new law will take effect June 1.
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America now looks like a marriage headed for divorce — with no exit
Marriages rarely end over one argument. They fall apart through a long breakdown in communication, a growing inability to resolve disagreements, and the slow realization that two people no longer walk toward the same future.
Healthy marriages don’t require full agreement on every subject. They require compromise on the decisions that shape daily life: money, children, priorities, responsibilities. They also require shared goals.
No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.
When those goals diverge — and neither side will realign — the relationship becomes unsustainable. The law calls the condition “irreconcilable differences.”
America now lives in that condition.
We remain bound under one nation, one Constitution, and one civic home. But we no longer share a common purpose. We no longer share a common story about what the country is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to endure.
This conflict no longer turns on tax rates or regulatory policy. It turns on the legitimacy and direction of the American experiment itself.
The modern left no longer argues about how to preserve the American system. It treats the system as the problem. Democratic leaders and activists call for “fundamental transformation,” flirt with socialism, and talk about the founding less as a flawed but noble legacy than as a moral failure that demands replacement. In that worldview, America doesn’t need reform. America needs erasure.
The right still believes the country can be repaired and preserved. The left increasingly treats the country as something to dismantle.
This rupture shows up in concrete ways. In 2021, the National Archives placed a “harmful language” warning on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — the documents that define the nation. That doesn’t signal ordinary partisan dispute. It signals contempt for the country’s moral foundation.
Socialism sits at the center of this divide. It contradicts the American system at its roots. America rests on the premise that rights come from God, not government. Socialism elevates the state over the individual and makes rights conditional on political approval. It centralizes power in the name of enforced equality — “equity.”
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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
America protects private property as an extension of liberty. It channels ambition into innovation and prosperity. Socialism treats success as a social offense and demands equality of outcome. When people refuse to surrender the fruits of their labor, socialism turns to coercion. Coercion requires centralized authority. Centralized authority punishes dissent.
The pattern repeats: less freedom, greater dependency, and a governing model incompatible with constitutional self-rule.
The irony remains hard to miss. The left calls Donald Trump “Hitler” while cheering figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist. Yet the Nazi Party sold itself as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — a collectivist project built on centralized power and state control.
The same left often excuses Antifa, a movement built on intimidation, street violence, and political enforcement designed to silence opposition. Those tactics don’t belong to liberal democracy. They belong to regimes that fear debate.
Even basic reality has become contested. The left and right can’t agree on something as elemental as what a man or a woman is. The Supreme Court recently showcased the collapse when ACLU attorneys arguing sex-based discrimination refused to define “woman.” When a society refuses to name biological facts that every civilization once treated as obvious, compromise collapses with it.
This crisis goes deeper than polarization. It reaches the level of knowledge itself. The left increasingly treats biology, history, and moral limits as malleable social constructs. The right still believes objective reality binds us all.
These aren’t normal disagreements. They describe incompatible worldviews. And incompatibility carries consequences.
During the COVID era, polls found majorities of Democrats willing to endorse coercive measures against the unvaccinated, including house arrest. Nearly half supported imprisoning people who questioned vaccine efficacy. Those numbers didn’t represent a fringe. They revealed a growing comfort with state force in service of ideological conformity.
After Trump’s 2016 election, many friendships survived political conflict. By 2020, after years of dehumanization — after constant accusations of “Nazism” aimed at ordinary voters — many of those relationships broke. The political battle stopped sounding like disagreement and started sounding like moral extermination.
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Photo by Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post via Getty Images
In September 2025, someone assassinated Charlie Kirk. Large segments of the left didn’t just rationalize the killing. Many celebrated it.
After Scott Adams died following a long fight with cancer, prominent voices responded with mockery instead of decency. People magazine ran a headline labeling him “disgraced.” Even death became a political verdict.
This is what irreconcilable differences look like at a national scale.
A country cannot endure when one side believes the nation stands as fundamentally good — worthy of preservation and reform — while the other believes it stands as irredeemably evil and must be dismantled. Marriages end when partners stop seeing each other as allies and start treating each other as enemies.
Nations fracture for the same reason.
America cannot solve this the way a couple dissolves a marriage. The Constitution binds us to one civic order. No clean separation awaits. No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.
When irreconcilable differences exist but separation remains impossible, the danger grows.
Only three paths remain: recommitment to constitutional principles, enforced coexistence through expanding coercion, or escalation into open conflict as dehumanization becomes normal.
Pretending this amounts to another election cycle, another policy dispute, or another cable-news food fight invites catastrophe. A nation cannot survive when its people no longer agree on what it is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to continue.
Unlike a failed marriage, America can’t walk away.
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