Dissenting perspectives on Chicago's City Council over the last four years were limited to a handful of aldermen, a new analysis of council voting patterns finds, allowing outgoing Mayor Richard Daley to press his agenda with huge voting majorities.
"The Last of the Daley Years," a report released this morning by University of Illinois-Chicago political science Professor Dick Simpson and his staff, tracks how often the city's 50 aldermen split from the Daley administration's priorities. The report only measures aldermanic agreement or disagreement with Daley on divided roll call votes, where at least one council member cast his or her ballot against the executive branch's position on an ordinance before the council; it does not judge the contents of an ordinance or resolution.
Daley's power to keep aldermen by his side increased over the last four years versus the previous council term. "The 2003-2007 city council voted with the mayor on average 83% [of the time] and the current 2007-2011 city council has voted with the mayor 88% of the time," the report says. The mayor lost no votes over the past four years. He never used his veto power to reject any council-driven ordinances.
And it is certainly amusing that all these stories critical of the way Shortshanks ran things, covered up things, drove the entire city to the verge of bankruptcy, are just now seeing the light as his reign of incompetency comes to an end. The fourth estate pretty much proved useless over the past two decades.