Mayor Lightfoot and the machine ... Part 4: An early victory for reform of City Hall

“Alderman, please. I will call you when I want to hear from you.”

— Mayor Lori Lightfoot, silencing veteran Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, while chairing her first Chicago City Council meeting, May 29, 2019

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For a while there we thought Lori Lightfoot’s nearly 3-to-1 drubbing of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle was Chicago’s most remarkable political win in many years. Then came the mayoral election victor’s show of dominion Wednesday over old-guard aldermen on the Chicago City Council. When it was over, Lightfoot had eclipsed her April 2 triumph.

Some of the aldermen for weeks had puffed out their chests, whispering threats of rebellion and essentially hoping that all of Lightfoot’s talk about reforming City Hall would be gone with the wind. Supposedly she was a goo-goo too radical for the old guard, even as the council’s socialist wing saw her as a lawyer too establishment.

What, then, is a tenderfoot mayor to do?

Confront and dominate the opposition before it coalesces into a force majeure, that’s what. Lightfoot shrewdly defused by addition some of the aldermanic whining: She created three new committees, giving herself three more chairs to select, aka a total of 18 council members to mollify with fiefdoms. And at Wednesday’s meeting, the aldermen who fear losing clout didn’t even try to mount an insurrection. Her reorganization ordinance passed on a voice vote, with a few grumbles of “No.”

Given the earlier threats to undercut her, this is a big victory for Lightfoot. A defeat would have diminished her. Instead, on only her 10th day in office, a rookie mayor has the committee chairs she put forward. Her first act as mayor — signing an executive order limiting aldermanic power — in retrospect looks like what she had promised voters: the initial step of a long march to reform of City Hall.

Every Chicagoan paying attention will notice that none of the council’s committee chairs is named Edward Burke. The council dean, facing one federal charge of attempted extortion and awaiting a more extensive indictment, at one point Wednesday tried to school Lightfoot. He complained about rules that used the pronoun “he” and that, he suggested, should be gender-neutral. Clever gotcha, or so it seemed. Would a female mayor stumble on a question about gender equity?

Lightfoot wouldn’t play along. The Tribune reports that Lightfoot cut off Burke, saying that if he had no other concerns, she was moving on. When Burke did rise with another concern, Lightfoot took him out with her smackdown: She’ll call him when she wants to hear from him.

Burke’s plight surely was on many minds as the aldermen decided it was smarter to fall in line behind Lightfoot than to challenge her nascent campaign against corruption, pinstripe patronage, insider deals and clouted City Council decisions. The aldermen know that the feds likely have some of them chattering on recordings made by a fellow, now former alderman. And who knows, some of them might be on those thousands of Burke telephone calls the government captured.

The upshot: Hanging over the aldermen Wednesday was the new mayor’s quite public campaign prediction that her former colleagues at Chicago’s U.S. attorney’s office won’t let Burke be the last council member to face criminal charges.

You wouldn’t call Wednesday’s council vote a deathbed conversion. You could, though, say that if hellish heat is about to descend on the aldermen, many of them would prefer to be high on a cloud with the angels.