Amid the standoff, Mayor Lori Lightfoot left the city Tuesday for meetings with federal officials in Washington, D.C., about Chicago’s infrastructure agenda. The trip gives Lightfoot distance from the racial ugliness of the map fight but opens her up to criticism that she should be staying home to try to broker peace. — Chicago Tribune
You would think these are crying times for the dregs of Chicago’s old Democratic machine. Harold Washington's old nemesis, “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak, is locked away in federal prison. His old partner in crime, “Slow Eddie” Burke, has been indicted and awaiting trial. And state Machine Boss Mike Madigan? Well, he may be too big to jail, but he’s apparently finished politically, tossed out as House Speaker and promising not to run for reelection to his House seat.
So why the grin on Ald. Burke’s face? That’s an easy one. He can’t help himself. Whenever he sees Black and Latino alderman fighting over scraps from the table of the city’s rich and powerful, he breaks out in a shit-eating grin. It awakens memories for him of the days when he and VD led the City Council’s infamous Vrdolyak 29, a cabal that could throw a monkey wrench into any and all policy initiatives of Chicago’s first Black mayor.
THE CURRENT BATTLE IS OVER THE CITY’S WARD REMAP
The council’s Black and Latino Caucuses are battling over the redrawing of the map with lots at stake for each. If the new map is based strictly upon the recent census, Blacks will lose and Latinos will gain some wards. My hope is that they cut a deal (the Chicago way) and unify for the greater good. The old Rainbow Coalition that began in the late 60s comes to mind. It was that black/brown coalition that brought the city’s first Black mayor to power in 1983 and broke the back of the old Daley machine. A similar coalition remains the best hope for the future of Chicago in these difficult times.
Fran Spielman writes in the Sun-Times:
The new citywide ward map being crafted for the Rules Committee by Mike Kasper, who served for decades as the election law expert for deposed Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, goes to great lengths to protect Burke.
It would accommodate an explosion of white population downtown and along the lakefront by creating a new downtown ward that takes in “pieces of the West Loop and pieces of the South Loop above the 25th Ward.”
And here’s John Byrne and Greg Pratt in the Trib,
One version of the Rules Committee map aldermen saw this week gave 14th Ward Ald. Edward Burke, who is under federal indictment, more majority-white precincts west of Midway International Airport, pushing Latina Ald. Silvana Tabares’ 23rd Ward entirely east of the airport. That map would also move the airport from Tabares’ ward into Ald. Marty Quinn’s 13th Ward.
Marty Quinn was Boss Madigan’s handpicked alderman for the 13th Ward. Two years ago, he was at the center of a #MeToo scandal swirling around Madigan’s once-impenetrable political organization. He had played a pivotal go-between role for his brother and political consultant Alaina Hampton, who accused Kevin Quinn of stalking her with a series of harassing text messages. Hampton’s charges were validated and she won a large settlement in a federal lawsuit against the state Democratic Party, the Democratic Majority, the 13th Ward Democratic Organization, and Friends of Michael J. Madigan.
You can hear all about it on this Hitting Left interview which we did with Alaina back in 2019.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot has made it clear that: 1) she will not directly intervene in the sectarian battle at this time (smart), and 2) she will veto any map that keeps Burke’s base area intact (even smarter). Don’t forget, MLL ran for mayor in 2019 on an explicitly anti-machine agenda and swept all 50 wards on election day. Her enemies have never forgiven her and their attempt to get her to take sides between the two caucuses is clearly a setup.
A deadline for gaining a Black/Latino consensus on the map redraw has come and gone, so there’s no real-time pressure on the mayor to directly intervene. If worse comes to worst, the new ward remap will be settled by the voters.
But before it reaches that point, the usual suspects among City Hall reporters (you know who you are) are going off on Mayor Lightfoot, attacking her for staying above the fray and especially for leaving town for D.C. around the time of the faux deadline.
Interestingly, it was veteran DC-based Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet who came to the mayor’s defense:
And all this is taking place while Lightfoot is in Washington. My reporting rivals back home pressed the mayor several times on why she left City Council members alone to negotiate as if her physical presence in the city could force a deal.
It should only be that easy.
I’m happy to defend the trip.
The mayor is here because she’s following the money, a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the city and related governments and agencies to grab tons of new federal cash from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill. If the Senate can pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better social spending and climate change bill, there will be lots more.
CapitolFax’s Rich Miller sums it up best on Twitter…
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