Mayor Brandon Johnson’s bid to pressure the Illinois General Assembly to pass a millionaire’s tax by putting an advisory referendum on the Chicago ballot was shot down Thursday in the latest act of defiance by an already emboldened City Council.
Johnson waited until the last Rules Committee meeting before the August recess to introduce the millionaire’s tax referendum directly to committee.
But members of the rebel bloc that rejected Johnson’s corporate head tax before approving an alternative city budget refused to go along with the mayor’s 11th-hour maneuver.
They argued that Roberts Rules of Order governing City Council proceedings requires direct introductions to committee to be reserved for emergencies, and an advisory referendum simply doesn’t qualify.
It was retiring Ald. Marty Quinn (13th) who led the charge to checkmate Johnson.
He accused the mayor of attempting to run roughshod over City Council rules simply because he “can’t get his act together” before the late August deadline to place advisory questions on the November ballot.
“The fact that the mayor is going to do a direct introduction under the disguise of an emergency on a non-binding referendum? No. I’m gonna call b.s. on that, and I did. And I won,” Quinn told the Sun-Times after the meeting.
“It has less to do with the subject matter and more to do with the pattern of abuse. We have to stand up against that because that’s gonna continue. You can’t do that. You have to push back on it. This is part of being co-equal,” he said. “We all have rules. We have to follow the same rules. It’s can’t be one set of rules for the mayor and another set of rules for the Council. That can’t happen.”
Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) served as Finance Committee chair under now-former Mayor Lori Lightfoot before being deposed by Johnson.
Waguespack noted that, even during the genuine emergency created by the pandemic, “only a certain type” of direct mayoral introductions “were allowed to move forward.”
“I’m a little perplexed about why we keep getting to this point because it is a violation of our rules, and it needs to stop,” Waguespack said.
“It will allow the 5th floor—whether it’s in this term with this mayor or future mayors—to essentially break the rules of the City Council,” he said. “This is about the rules. And if we’re just going to sit here and let the 5th floor break them, what’s the point of being here?”
Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) added, “This is political theater. This is garbage.”
Johnson has repeatedly gone around Roberts Rules of Order, which require non-emergency items to be introduced to the full City Council, then referred to the appropriate committee.
The mayor used a direct introduction to committee to speed consideration of the Renter Protection Ordinance he hopes to use to court renters, a potentially potent voting bloc that includes roughly 660,000 Chicago voters.
After thwarting Johnson, the Rules Committee approved four alternative questions—one of them another direct introduction from Johnson — forcing the full City Council to choose three out of four since city election law includes a three-question limit.
Alderpersons made an exception for that one mayoral introduction because of the politically volatile subject matter.
It asks voters whether Chicago should “pursue all lawful means to recover financial compensation from the federal government for the costs and economic harm caused by the federal immigration raids known as Operation Midway Blitz.
That one will compete with three other advisory questions submitted by the same renegade bloc.
They would ask November voters to weigh in on whether Chicago should “restart the use of gunshot detection technology that informs first responders when gunshots are detected”; whether Chicago should make its “contribution to city pension funds in the first quarter of the year to reduce long-term debt” and whether Chicago should develop a permanent festival and outdoor event space” for large-scale gatherings.
Chicago mayors and their City Council allies have a long history of using the three-referendums-per-election limit to their advantage.
They routinely put innocuous referendums on the ballot so that other, more controversial questions are kept off the ballot that risk bolstering turnout from already ornery voters who might vent their anger against incumbents.
The mayor’s office pushed back hard against the latest in a string of Council rebellions.
“The same members who chose to sic debt collectors on working Chicagoans instead of taxing the largest corporations, plunging us into a $130 million budget hole with an alternative budget based on faulty projections, have yet again gone out of their way to stand in the way of a progressive revenue that would enable consistent, reliable funding for our public schools and the critical services Chicagoans rely on every day,” the mayor’s office statement said.
“This begs the question: Do they believe in taxing the wealthy at all? Instead, they chose to deny Chicagoans a voice, reviving Machine-era traditions of keeping the public out of decisions that directly affect their lives in lieu of ballot questions that are moot and do nothing to address the real challenges our residents face.”
The mayor’s office noted that “70% of Chicago voters” supported Gov. JB Pritzker’s failed binding referendum that would have paved the way for a graduated income tax in Illinois.
“Rather than trust voters to weigh in again, these members chose to shield powerful special interests instead of standing with working people,” the mayor’s statement said.