While no one could have predicted, these developments – and the thawing of Mayor Lori Lightfoot by a police raid – will set the stage for what is to come. I am not predicting what will happen in 2021. But there are a few things to keep in mind as the top three civil servants in the state try to make their way through genuine crises.
What will happen in 2021 begins with Madigan. His fate will dramatically affect Governor JB Pritzker’s ability to get things done, and this knife cuts both ways.
The governor seriously needs to balance his budget, after heading the only state in the union that has applied for loans from the Federal Reserve to keep the fiscal ship afloat. This will mean more spending cuts that will affect even more than the $ 700 million it has ordered so far and / or improved revenue, better known as a tax hike. Either will be a much easier legislative sale with a speaker willing to vote in droves.
The problem is that the participation of this same speaker in the bribery scandal in the Edison Commonwealth is one of the main reasons why Pritzker’s income tax was defeated. Voters, at least a significant number of them, simply do not trust Springfield with Madigan in power. The related problem is that now 19 members of Madigan’s group have come to the same conclusion. For them, the speaker is now a passive. Having stated that they cannot support him for a new term when they meet in early January, they have no way out easy, even as Madigan insists he run again.
This one has all the ingredients of a large-scale train wreck. And this is before the ever-disputed issue of the legislative remap, which Pritzker has pledged to resolve in a new and more transparent way, but which Madigan seems to be trying to get out of his back pocket as always. Or the main topic of the legislature meeting while COVID-19 is still sinking, with Madigan seemingly very happy to never meet, not even remotely, as the Chicago City Council and other legislatures have done. .
Just remember, Governor. It is your neck that you will be blocked when you face voters in fifteen months.
As for Lightfoot, it has the same financial problems as Pritzker, problems that will only get worse unless it is able to get substantial new relief money from Washington’s COVID. So far he has juggled loans. And indebted. And by borrowing a little more. This cannot continue. Nor can it be the decimation of the city’s central business district, which is key to Chicago’s economy.
But right now the mayor has serious problems. This is the police raid in which a group of male police officers handcuffed a naked woman in their own apartment as they turned the place upside down, ignoring their requests for them to be at the wrong house. First Lightfoot said he didn’t know about it, and then admitted that his officials had told him. He then half-defended the city’s lawyers ’decision to fight the public release of body camera tapes from the incident, only to turn around a couple of days later and fire his lead attorney before he even of putting the police involved at work and then hiring a -judge to do an external probe.
Wow! Can an existential crisis be spelled out? A mayor who was hired because she promised transparency, reforms and racial equity presides over the kind of mess Rahm Emanuel could have left behind.
The year 2021 was not pleasant. For the mayor, governor and president, we will see how unpleasant it will be in 2021.