The politicians in Springfield are trying to pull another fast one with the inaptly named Citizens First Amendment.

Legislation aimed undermining the integrity of legislative elections in Illinois under the guise of strengthening the electoral process was passed out of an Illinois Senate committee this week and is awaiting further legislative action.

The legislation purports to be a proposed amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would make needed changes to the current disgraceful decennial legislative redistricting process that all but guarantees incumbents re-election. But the amendment is a deliberate sham that only further institutionalizes the current process by which the majority party draws district boundary lines designed to give it an electoral advantage.

In others words, it's more of the same flim-flam that Illinois politicians have been giving voters for years now.

This year's U.S. Census process means that next year legislative bodies all across the country will be required to redraw their boundary lines – it's called reapportionment – in response to the population changes the census identifies. Naturally, the General Assembly will be a part of that, and the majority Democrats were hoping that the redistricting process would be the usual relatively quiet process.

But, energized and angered by the state's relentless political corruption, major interest groups including the Farm Bureau and the League of Women Voters decided this would be a good time to take on one of the sources of this state's problems – one-party rule in the Legislature that is guaranteed by the gerrymandering of legislative districts.

The ugly reality is that legislative elections in Illinois are mostly an illusion of democracy rather than real democracy by virtue of gerrymandering. It's a rare incumbent – Democrat or Republican – who loses because the lines are drawn to produce specific results.

The League has been organizing a petition drive to put the Fair Map amendment to the Illinois Constitution on the fall ballot. But the amendment, which would establish an independent commission to draw district lines rather than allow legislators to draw their own district lines, needs nearly 300,000 signatures to get on the ballot. Frankly, it's a long shot.

Legislative Democrats, however, are clever enough to know that they need a proposal to use as a shield against Fair Map. So they drafted a proposal ironically titled the "Citizens First Amendment" that carries a veneer of change but largely maintains the status quo.

This week, an Illinois Senate Committee controlled by Democrats rejected Fair Map and approved Citizens First on party-line votes. The idea, at least in theory, is to put the measure on the ballot for a vote, but Democrats really don't care about that.

They care about maintaining the status quo or as much of it as possible. That requires defeating Fair Map in the Legislature while hoping that Fair Map supporters don't succeed in collecting enough signatures to get their proposal on the ballot through the initiative process.

Citizens First ought to be titled Citizens Last because its real intent is to keep the current majority party in power for another 10 years no matter what the voters want. The proposed amendment is the functional equivalent of lipstick on a pig. It's a ruse, a ploy, a con designed to placate legitimate public anger over the state of the state of Illinois.

Nothing will change if the politicians who created the state's current dysfunctional politics are charged with coming up with solutions. But that, of course, is the idea.