Chicago

Chicago Mayor Emanuel Gives Unions a Choice: Concessions or Layoffs

by Ivan Osorio on July 1, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

Leaders of government employee unions must be feeling lonely these days. Across the country, Democratic state and local elected officials — traditional union allies — are asking their public employee unions for concessions, in order to bring their governments’ finances under control.

This week, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, presented the unions representing city employees with a tough choice: Agree to cost-saving concessions or endure layoffs. Emanuel said he had identified the first 625 employees who would face layoffs if the unions do not agree to concessions.

This trend could continue if voters reward those politicians who impose budget discipline, taking on entrenched union interests. As William Kovacs and I note in the new issue of Labor Watch, economic reality is finally winning out over politics in some areas.

To gain some measure of control over their runaway public ?nances, Democrat-controlled states are acknowledging that they will have to make tough decisions that Big Labor will hate. Despite accepting millions of dollars in union campaign contributions, some Democratic of? ceholders are ignoring Big Labor’s demands. They are seeking budget cuts and union concessions.

“Public unions have a symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Party,“ observes Manhattan Institute senior fellow Daniel DiSalvo. “They provide essential campaign dollars and boots on the ground to Democratic candidates. … Therefore, most efforts to alter collective bargaining rules, to give government managers greater autonomy to innovate, or to reduce the costs of compensation, are likely to come from Republicans.”

However, DiSalvo has noticed that larger changes are taking place. Writing in  The Washington Examiner, he argues that, “[T]here are outside forces that may make reform inevitable. Global competition and technological innovation will demand it. That is if the huge unfunded liabilities for pensions and health care don’t catch up with state and local governments ?rst.”

For more on the divisions between Democrats and government employee unions, see here.

LibertyWeek 96: Donut Day Disobedience

by Richard Morrison on June 8, 2010

in CEI Projects, Features, Podcast, Zeitgeist

Richard Morrison and Marc Scribner welcome Chris Horner, Sam Kazman, and Ryan Radia to Episode 96 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We cover Chicago’s dishonorable gun restrictions, a special interview with bestselling author Christopher C. Horner, civil disobedience on National Donut Day, a shout out to CEI’s annual dinner gala and the FTC’s proposed “Drudge Report Tax”.

Regulation of the Day 114: Unlicensed Fruit Candy

by Ryan Young on February 11, 2010 · 2 comments

in Nanny State, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

The Chicago Tribune has a jaw-dropping story of regulators gone wild:

Department of Health inspectors seized, slashed open and poured bleach over thousands of dollars of local peaches, pears, raspberry and plum purees owned by pastry chef Flora Lazar… Inspectors cited no health problems with any of the food.

And that’s just the beginning. Read the whole thing. This is a scandal. Ms. Lazar is out of business for six months and has lost about $6,000. There is no evidence of harm. This is no way to treat a small business. Especially during a recession.

(Hat tip: the ever-resourceful Brian McGraw)

Supreme Court to Decide Whether Second Amendment Forbids State and Local Gun Bans

by Hans Bader on October 1, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty

The Supreme Court has agreed to review a lower court ruling upholding Chicago’s handgun ban.   In 2008, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 vote, struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban.  But the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to apply that ruling to Chicago’s handgun ban, saying that the Second Amendment only applies against the federal government, not state and local governments like Chicago.  A decision in McDonald v. Chicago is expected some time next year.

The idea that the Second Amendment only applies against the federal government, not state and local governments, is a relic of the Cruikshank and Presser cases in the 19th Century, in which the Supreme Court stated that both the Bill of Rights in general, and the First and Second Amendments in particular, only apply against the federal government, not the states.  But by the 1930s, the Supreme Court had firmly rejected this rule under what is known as “incorporation,” under which the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment was read by the courts to incorporate against state governments almost all of the rights contained in the Bill of Rights, such as First Amendment rights, the right to private property, and the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment.

The Seventh Circuit held that it was bound by the 19th Century decisions refusing to apply the Second Amendment against the states — never mind that that their reasoning, and related ruling that the First Amendment applies only against the federal government, have been rejected by many subsequent decisions specifically ruling that free speech, as a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, applies to state and local governments, too, through incorporation under the Due Process Clause.

Moreover, the Supreme Court’s 19th Century gun decisions weren’t even controlling, since they rejected a different argument than the one that the Chicago gun ban challengers recently made, as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh notes.

The Supreme Court in those cases only addressed the argument that the Privileges and Immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects against state restrictions, not the argument that the Due Process Clause protects against states.  By contrast, the challengers to Chicago’s gun ban relied on the Due Process Clause, based on Supreme Court decisions after Presser holding that it incorporates against the states the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.

The Seventh Circuit’s using a Supreme Court case involving one argument to reject a different argument violated basic principles laid down by the Supreme Court itself.  The Supreme Court has warned that “cases cannot be read as foreclosing an argument that they never dealt with.”See Waters v. Churchill, 511 U.S. 661, 678 (1994).

The Supreme Court has emphasized this many times. See, e.g., Texas v. Cobb, 532 U.S. 162, 169 (2001) (“constitutional rights are not defined by inferences from opinions which did not address the question at issue”); Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, 511 U.S. 211, 232 n.6 (1994) (“the unexplained silences of our decisions are not entitled to precedential weight”).

Thus, the Supreme Court should reverse the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in National Rifle Association v. City of Chicago, 567 F.3d 856 (7th Cir. 2009).

LibertyWeek 34: Michelle Minton Conquers the World

by Richard Morrison on March 17, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Your regular hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist are joined by special guest co-host Michelle Minton for Episode 34 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin by finding that Twitter has conquered every aspect of society, the White House is waging war on the economy and New Yorkers are defending themselves against beer taxes. We next investigate the questionable management of the AIG bailout in Scandal Watch and handicap Chicago’s chances for snagging the 2016 summer games in Olympic News.

Congratulations to FreeStateNH (The Free State Project) for winning the honor of Tweet of the Week™!

Stopping Wasteful Spending: Better Latte Than Never

by Richard Morrison on January 7, 2009 · 1 comment

in Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Working in Washington, D.C. for the last decade, I’ve become familiar with the experience of criminal conduct in city government. The city sports a culture of corruption so brazen that it has included everyone from the (former) mayor down to local beat cops. The crimes perpetrated include everything from selling drugs to demanding kickbacks from government contractors to a $50 million embezzlement scam perpetrated by local tax officials.

It is therefore with a spirit of weary amusement that I read about a group of Chicago Public Schools officials and their recent purchase of $67,000 worth of espresso makers:

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.

That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general’s 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted.

In the case of the cappuccino machines, central office administrators split the order among 21 vocational schools to avoid competitive bidding required for purchases over $10,000. As a result CPS paid about $12,000 too much, according to Inspector General James Sullivan. “We were able to find the same machines cheaper online,” he said.

So is that the problem – not that someone spent $67,000 on fancy coffee makers – but that they paid slightly too much for them? Would things have been acceptable if they had ordered them off of the website the IG found for $1,833 each instead of the actual purchase price of $2,233? More importantly, are they keeping them or can I buy one off of eBay at a massive discount?

One more thing: D.C. has, of course, had plenty of public school officials playing fast and loose with government money as well – amazingly, some of them even went to jail! In their defense, though, D.C. public school employees can be forgiven for thinking the District has an unlimited supply of cash. We spend about $24,600 per pupil per year — about $10,000 more than the average for area private schools.