Wednesday was a sad — and avoidable — day for Chicago and for the City Council. The spectacle on the council floor, as Mayor Brandon Johnson had to break a 23-23 tie in favor of a resolution calling for an immediate, unconditional cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, was a model of how not to conduct the city’s business.
Emotions are running extraordinarily high around the.conflict in the Middle East. But what Johnson did on Wednesday — not only in backing a one-sided resolution that failed to cite Hamas’ role in instigating this horrific situation and the well-documented barbarity and atrocities the terrorist group perpetrated on Israeli civilians, but also in working feverishly behind the scenes to garner a slim majority for it — is precisely the opposite of what a mayor ought to be doing. The mayor and the aldermen who voted for this accomplished nothing other than to inflame a situation that already is boiling over.
By far the most striking image from the disgraceful proceeding, and the one we’re betting will stick with Chicagoans in the future, was that of 50th Ward Ald. Debra Silverstein, the one and only Jewish member of the council, being shouted down and screamed at by the gallery as she opposed this resolution. Johnson offered only the mildest of reproaches to the unruly spectators and appeared only very reluctantly to call for clearing the chamber after Silverstein asked a second time for decorum. That led to an hour’s delay before Silverstein could resume speaking and arguing how this resolution didn’t represent a compromise, which she had sought and proposed.
As antisemitic words and actions alarmingly increase in this country, that visual was one most big-city mayors would have done anything to prevent.
Not so this one. That’s as callous as it is appalling.
Silverstein courageously called Johnson out on the floor as he looked on, decrying the role he played. “I don’t understand why there was so much personal political capital put behind this when 28 alders asked for collaboration, and there was absolutely no collaboration from the other side,” she said. “You need to speak on behalf of our entire city, Mr. Mayor. It’s time to work on unifying this city instead of dividing it.”
Amen.
So how did Johnson manage to eke out the narrowest of “wins” here? Four aldermen didn’t attend the meeting, including two very senior members, Pat Dowell, 3rd, and Vice Mayor Walter Burnett, 27th. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Johnson personally asked Burnett and Ald. Stephanie Johnson, 16th, not to attend if they couldn’t vote yes. Ald. Nicole Lee, 11th, who was among the 28 to sign Silverstein’s letter calling for the compromise, surprised aldermen in opposition by voting for the resolution despite, she said, “not being aligned with 100% of the words on this page.”
It’s fair to think that, had all 50 aldermen attended, the resolution would have failed. Some victory.
These are the kinds of political machinations ordinarily reserved for critical public-policy matters like tax increases needed to fill budget gaps, not issues that should be of matters of individual conscience. Instead, this mayor resorted to the heavy-handed tactics to get a merely symbolic resolution approved.
Resolutions, whether in Chicago City Council or most legislative bodies, typically are feel-good votes — on issues where there’s broad public agreement and lawmakers want to reflect that. It’s rare to see one needing a mayoral tie-breaking vote in order to pass. And it doesn’t project strength. It merely reflects the intense division around an issue that we didn’t need a City Council debate to know existed.
The vast majority of us want peace in the Middle East and immediate humanitarian protections for both Israeli and Palestinian civilians. But how to achieve that is hard. The mayor easily could have insisted on a resolution, for example, that acknowledged the suffering being experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis and called for a cease-fire only upon the release of hostages. That would have garnered an overwhelming majority, and the council could move on to issues over which it has some control.
It doesn’t take a diplomatic genius to know that an unconditional cease-fire, which is what the 23 aldermen plus Mayor Johnson are calling for, isn’t going to achieve any sort of stable peace. There are intense negotiations happening as we write. That is the way to get to a cease-fire. All Johnson accomplished by siding with the most strident voices on this issue was to further inflame a city that already feels disturbingly unstable under his leadership. This resolution doesn’t reflect the views of the nation’s third largest city to the broader world — not when it required LBJ-like arm-twisting to achieve.
And the cost of this performative nonsense? As Silverstein eloquently stated on the council floor, Jews in the city now feel even more alone and unsafe than they did before this action. “One-sided, biased resolutions like this one are part of the reason why hate against Jews is spiking,” she said.
Mr. Mayor, encouraging hate against more than 100,000 of your residents, based on their religious or ethnic identity, is hardly “leading with love,” as you like to say you do.
Here’s what Johnson said at the recent opening in Chicago of the Parliament of the World’s Religions: “As mayor of the city of Chicago, I will continue to bring people together, surrounded by our commonality of loving one another, loving people enough to invest in people.”
Is that what you did on Wednesday, Mr. Mayor? The answer to that is no. Not by a long shot.