The long battle to make it harder to gerrymander Illinois legislative districts suffered a major setback Wednesday when a Cook County Circuit Court judge ruled a proposed amendment that was to go to the voters on Nov. 8 is unconstitutional.

Backers of the amendment, who collected a stunning 564,000 signatures on petitions seeking the referendum, on Wednesday filed for an expedited appeal before the Illinois Supreme Court.

Gov. Bruce Rauner once told some of Chicago’s wealthiest and most influential civic leaders that half of Chicago Public Schools’ teachers “are virtually illiterate” and half of the city’s principals are “incompetent,” according to emails Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration released Thursday under a court order.

Rauner made the assertion five years ago when he was a wealthy private equity executive and an active participant in Chicago school reform. His emails were part of a discussion with affluent education reform activists connected to the nonprofit Chicago Public Education Fund, including Penny Pritzker, now U.S. commerce secretary; billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin; Chicago investment executive Mellody Hobson; and Helen Zell, wife of billionaire real estate magnate Sam Zell.

“Teacher evaluation is critically important, but in a massive bureaucracy with a hostile union, where 50% of principals are managerially incompetent and half of teachers are virtually illiterate, a complete multi-dimensional evaluation system with huge subjectivity in it will be attacked, manipulated and marginalized — the status quo will prevail,” Rauner wrote in a December 2011 email arguing for a strong system of teacher and principal evaluations in the district. “It’s much more critical that we develop a consistent, rigorous, objective, understandable measure and reporting system for student growth upon which all further evaluation of performance will depend.”

Two lawmakers included in a report by former city watchdog Faisal Khan that alleges “potentially illegal” contributions to dozens of aldermen are firing back.

Earlier this week, the report by Khan, now CEO of group called Project Six, alleged that 37 of the city’s 50 aldermen accepted the campaign donations from real estate developers, lobbyists, and city vendors in 2015. He said such suspect donations came from “business entities and individuals that directly benefited from legislation in City Council.”

After more than six months reviewing the civil rights division of Chicago City Hall’s law department, former U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb has recommended more than 50 policy changes but found no “evidence establishing a culture, practice or approach” of “engaging in intentional misconduct,” according to a 74-page report released Thursday.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration commissioned Webb’s review of the department’s Federal Civil Rights Litigation Division after Jordan Marsh, a senior city attorney, resigned in January in the wake of being sanctioned for concealing evidence in a police-shooting case. That case is among six since 2012 in which courts have disciplined city officials for “failure to produce documents in discovery” or for not producing records quickly enough, the report said.

As Mike Pence cultivates a national image as Donald Trump’s running mate, abandoning a re-election bid for a second term as Indiana governor in the process, he may leave unanswered a historic pardon request involving the wrongful conviction of an Illinois man.

It’s been more than two years since the Indiana Parole Board recommended to Pence the pardon of Keith Cooper for a brutal armed robbery 20 years ago.

Nearly half a century after delegates to the Illinois Constitutional Convention explicitly said as much, a Cook County Circuit Court judge confirmed that yes, it’s appropriate for voters to propose an amendment to change the way the state’s legislative maps are drawn.

Redistricting reform “in general” falls within the simply worded yet excruciatingly deconstructed language of Article XIV, Section 3, Judge Diane Larsen said.

But Larsen’s ruling on Wednesday underscored something else you already knew: It’s virtually impossible for citizens to get an amendment on the ballot.