For those of you who dwell in the provinces beyond the purview of the Chicago Machine, President Obama’s recess appointment to the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is business-as-usual for the “city that works.” While Republican leaders in Congress remain oblivious to the threats to our liberty from this style of governance, let me remind you that Chicago has a weak mayor, strong council system — on paper.
Does anyone remember GOP senators telling us Obamacare couldn’t pass, because it had to go back to the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Well, it didn’t, and we got the bill.
Precisely the same abuse worked for the administration and its union allies at the National Labor Relations Board in December. Pushing through rules to allow quickie elections favoring union organization efforts sailed through 2-to-1 on the vote of a recess-appointed commissioner, whose term expired on Dec. 31. The lone Republican member dithered about resigning and denying them a quorum. Well, he didn’t, they did, and we got stuck again.
Republicans love polite debates about government. Democrats steam ahead accruing clout to themselves and their friends; they understand power and dependency. That was the point of taking Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., quite visibly to the woodshed over his slowness to vote for Obamacare.
Has it yet occurred to the GOP that Solyndra’s sole purpose was to pass money to green, big-government groups right under the party’s nose? Wrapping presents in pretty packages is designed to make them a surprise. But, for whom?
Tragically, suburbanites around Chicago too often ignore this. To them, big government means the village putting flowers in the highway median; a free market is having the garden club do it.
The machine, once in power, will pass a flower tax, stick a plastic petunia in the pavement and pay its pals to sleep in the truck until the polls open. The difference is only an election or two.
The goal remains permanent empowerment. Normal Americans tend to forget politicians are paid in votes, not dollars. Once ensconced in office, elected officials control the budget to do what they want. With enough voters to win all the elections, there is no easy way to limit their power.
The very strength of our democratic institutions is turned against us. Who elects the judges to oversee the prosecutions for corruption? Mayor Daley told Republicans, including my father, asking for a recount after the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election they could have it, at one precinct a day.
Larry Horist, a veteran of many battles with the machine, recalls running a Chicago neighborhood campaign as a college student for Chuck Percy, then a Republican candidate for governor.
The snowplows would raise their blades passing his family’s house, while city workers shoveled the ward captain’s front steps down the block. Government services are always subordinate to machine politics, very useful as reward and punishment, very expensive.
Call the alderman, and be sure to give him a contribution, not the Streets and Sanitation Department paid out of your taxes. Add hundreds of billions to this, and you will begin to understand Washington today.
Why does it need around 20 percent of our economy to feed itself, when the number was about 4 percent at the height of the Roaring Twenties and the hundred peacetime years before?
Republicans where I live tell refugees from the city that they can talk politics and still get their garbage picked up. It usually takes two years to sink in. Even then, they struggle with the idea of having a choice of garbage companies and prices.
Henry Meers is a retired investment adviser, active in politics, living in Frankfort, Ill.
