Comptroller Susanna Mendoza has become the first Chicago mayoral candidate to stake out a clearly pro-law enforcement position, telling NewsNation she has full faith and confidence in the Chicago Police Department, that Superintendent Larry Snelling is the best in the nation, and that the problem is a fifth-floor administration that does not believe in holding criminals accountable. She cited officers being surrounded in their vehicles, having tear gas thrown at them, and being attacked with fire extinguishers as examples of what happens when political leadership abandons its responsibility to back law enforcement.
Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess Mendoza’s prospects, the broader mayoral field, and a new piece he wrote examining the constitutional vulnerabilities of the taxes crammed into Illinois’s latest state budget.
On Mendoza, Glennon said he is exactly where Proft is, calibrating expectations accordingly. He noted that her brother is a police officer, which probably means she receives regular doses of common sense on the subject. He said she is a strong vote-getter statewide, having outpolled Pritzker himself in the last cycle they both ran, though she did not make the runoff in Chicago the last time she ran for mayor. Her record as comptroller has involved going along with Pritzker’s false narrative about righting the state’s financial ship, which is not a persuasive credential given that the ship remains a basket case, and her entire career has been spent inside the political power structure from state representative forward, with relationships to figures like Mike Madigan and Ed Burke that will be excavated and examined. But Glennon’s core point is that every candidate whose name has been mentioned comes to the table with the same dirty hands, and Mendoza at least distinguishes herself on a couple of issues even if she is not transformative.
On Ald. Ameya Pawar and Alexi Giannoulias, whom Proft characterized as the Combine’s preferred front man, Glennon noted that Giannoulias brings the Broadway Bank problems from his 2010 Senate race against Mark Kirk back to the surface, has done little of note since that race other than getting appointed Secretary of State where his primary accomplishment has been issuing driver’s licenses to people in the country illegally, and represents continuity with the insider power structure that many Chicagoans may be hoping to move past. He said the current Brandon Johnson administration has focused the political grift specifically on the Chicago Teachers Union and minority contractors in ways that have cut out the other ethnic political coalitions that used to enjoy the run of the place, making this a genuinely historic turning point for Chicago politics. The question is whether the next mayor restores the old continuity or whether Chicago voters actually demand a serious discussion of the real problems.
On the state budget’s new tax provisions, Glennon said the legislature threw approximately $800 million in new taxes against the wall, including a social media tax, a digital advertising tax, and a cryptocurrency tax, without serious attention to whether any of them would survive legal challenge. He said the constitutional obstacles are not his own legal theories but are already on record from lawyers and affected businesses, covering the federal Commerce Clause, federal legislation specifically prohibiting special taxes on internet and electronic services that discriminate against them relative to traditional media, and fundamental definitional problems such as who counts as a user for purposes of the social media tax. He said the interim period while these cases work through the courts will create enormous compliance uncertainty for businesses trying to figure out what they actually owe.
He made the broader point that it did not used to be this way. Lawmakers once paid at least some attention to constitutionality before passing legislation. Those days are over in Springfield. The approach now is to pass whatever serves political interests and let the courts sort it out, with businesses bearing the compliance costs in the meantime.
On the acceleration of the business exodus, Proft raised John Deere’s move toward Crown Point, Lando Frost moving to New Mexico, reports that WeatherTech may leave Illinois, and the Bears’ move toward Hammond as the latest in a line that includes Caterpillar, Citadel, and Boeing. Glennon said there is not a single item in the new budget or the broader legislative session that addresses the causes of any of those departures. The property tax relief that was supposed to be a priority for homeowners on the south side and south suburbs who were devastated by Cook County reassessments went nowhere. The premise underlying every decision coming out of Springfield, he said, is that the things causing the exodus should be continued and intensified, which is a perfectly accurate summary of what the legislature actually did.