The Chicago Sun-Times' Chris Fusco and Tim Novak report: (emphasis added)

Over the past nine years, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan's law firm has made $171,000 by seeking property tax breaks for developers who get state financing to build low-income housing, records show.

His firm's payments came through the Illinois Housing Development Authority, the state agency that financed those projects.

Records also show the firm of Madigan & Getzendanner helped another state contractor save about $300,000 in property taxes on the Atrium Mall and food court it operates inside the James R. Thompson Center, the state's main office building in Chicago.

The mall operator is now suing the state over that deal -- a case that involved Madigan's daughter, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

The speaker has never disclosed any of his firm's clients on ethics statements Illinois legislators must file every year. Instead, the South Side lawmaker and head of the state's Democratic Party discloses only that he provides "legal services for various individuals, partnerships and corporations."

Madigan -- the longest-serving House speaker in Illinois -- "complies with the law and often goes beyond that," says his spokesman, Steve Brown.

Illinois House Speaker Madigan has been Illinois House speaker for 24 out of the last 26 years, and, as the Sun-Times notes, his daughter is the state's Attorney General.

This is not an isolated example of how Chicago works: in May 2008, we noted a Sun-Times story by veteran City Hall reporter Fran Speilman reporting that arguably the second-most powerful Democrat in Chicago, City Council Finance Chairman Ed Burke, had "38 law clients that did business with the city or other local government agencies" last year.

Ald. Burke -- who has an annual salary of about $103,000 per year, along with an annual expense account of over $70,000, and has been the chairman of the Finance Committee for 24 out of the last 26 years -- is allowed to make outside income because his aldermanic job is considered 'part-time'; Burke's wife Anne is an Illinois Supreme Court Justice.

Punch 10...