If Chicago City Council members spent $8 million to erect a statue of F. Lee Bailey stuffing the Michael Jordan statue outside the United Center, they would never hear the end of it.
If they spent $8 million to feed all 37,211 lawyers in Cook County a couple of steak dinners at Gibsons, taxpayers would howl.
And yet, they can do something just about as foolish–throw $8 million into the largest make-work program for lawyers the city has ever seen–and hardly anybody raises a peep.
Next Tuesday, a battery of lawyers that could fill a baseball starting lineup will converge on the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Brian Duff to resume trial on a claim that the boundaries of Chicago’s 50 wards are racially discriminatory.
This lawsuit has been kicking around the courts for four years. The attorney’s fees for the city alone have passed the $5 million mark and are expected to reach $8 million before it’s done. That’s because Ald. Ed Burke’s council Finance Committee decided that the couple of hundred lawyers the city has on staff couldn’t handle this case alone, and it had to bring in some high-priced outside talent.
Now, $8 million might be justified if this case were going to remedy some gross injustice, but it’s not. There’s about a 98 percent chance that it won’t really do a darn thing.
Back in 1992, black and white aldermen couldn’t agree on how the wards should be drawn up after the 1990 census. They were close to a deal, but each side was so piggish that no compromise was made. So two maps were put to Chicago voters in a referendum. No surprise, the one backed by Mayor Richard Daley won.
It’s hard to say the map won the election because it wasn’t as though Chicago voters studied the census trends for the city and decided that the map with the squiggly lines going this way was better than the map with the squiggly lines going that way. They listened to their precinct captains, and Daley’s people still have more precinct captains than anybody else. So Daley’s map got more votes.
This led to 19 black wards, 24 white wards, 7 Hispanic wards, 3 lawsuits and about 652 press conferences where representatives of one aggrieved party or another cried foul.
Foul? Well, maybe so, maybe not. By the census figures, Chicago’s population is 38.6 percent black, which justifies 19 wards. And that’s what happened.
The Hispanic population is 19.6 percent, which justifies 9 wards. So it looks like they got a little shortchanged. But the Hispanic voting population is much smaller than 19 percent and, anyway, most Hispanic leaders were boosting Daley’s map. They were happy with 7, which was 3 more than they already had.
And the whites? The white population justifies 19 seats. In their minds they gave blacks and Hispanics what was due to them, so they were free to take their 19 seats and scarf up anything left on the table, which happened to be five more seats in the council.
So the gist of the legal fight is that whites got more council seats than they should have, and the remedy should be to give blacks more councils seats than they should have.
If that sounds a little odd, it’s because of what’s not being said in this fight: This game is by invite only, and the invitations only went to blacks, whites, Hispanics and $8 million worth of lawyers.
How about Asians? By their population, they should have two council seats. They don’t have any. We’re told that there aren’t enough Asians living in one place to give them a ward. So, they’re out of luck.
Four years of haranguing over this has resolved nothing. There’s a very good chance that by the time it is resolved, it will be time to start the 2000 census, which will mean new numbers, which will require a whole new ward map, and that undoubtedly will mean a whole new round of lawsuits and a new make-work program for the you know who’s.
There’s one way to salvage this thing. That’s to come up with a new way to elect the City Council so the battles over fairness don’t become a perennial court case. There’s a way to do that, but nobody in this case seems to want to talk about it . . . except the judge.
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Judge Brian Duff, a former state legislator, probably has the best mix of legal acumen and political savvy on the federal bench here. Almost two years ago, he suggested a very good solution. He said Chicago should consider changing to cumulative voting.
Yes, that’s one of the ideas Lani Guinier was tossing around a few years ago when she was shot down as a nominee to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department.
It’s also the idea that Illinois adopted in the 1870 state constitution. That’s why members of the Illinois House were elected for more than a century through cumulative voting, until we stupidly dumped it in 1980.
Rather than 50 wards with one alderman, Chicago could have, say, 10 wards with five aldermen in each. Everyone would have 5 votes to cast–and could cast as many as all five for one candidate. That would give more minority groups a fighting chance to have representation in the council. The much larger geographic territory of the wards would make it more difficult to gerrymander the boundaries, and make it more likely that city residents would be represented by black and white aldermen. That would go a long way toward breaking down the racial isolation in the city.
None of the lawyers jumped on the idea when Duff raised it from the bench. That’s really too bad. It would be a revolution in Chicago politics, and that would be worth $8 million anytime.