That take-a-breath, start-a-diet, pause-the-boozing, figure-out-a-way-to-make-some-money New Year’s reset we’re all looking for feels lost to a pandemic and the exhausting partisan bickering in Congress over aid to Americans feeling the financial toll of a virus that has shattered the economy.
Elected leaders — both Democrats and Republicans — have pointed to the tragedies and controversies of 2020 as an “inflection point” that will echo next year and beyond. So for The Spin’s final edition of 2020, here’s a look at some of the big events in politics that likely will spill into 2021.
Most obvious is the intersection of COVID-19 and the fallout from the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, which underscored not only the country’s unrelenting racial and socioeconomic divide, but also a demand for change that has caught the attention of politicians.
The November election may have handed a victory to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office Jan. 20, but President Donald Trump has not relented on his claims that the election was stolen from him. We’ll have barely rung in the new year when the Jan. 5 special election in Georgia will be upon us, determining not only which party has control of the U.S. Senate but also how far Biden might be able to advance his agenda.
What’s certain: State and local elected leaders such as Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lightfoot will now have someone in the White House with whom they can communicate — not just trade barbs. Biden already is saying state and local governments should get more COVID-19 relief money.
The ComEd bribes-for-favors scandal that surfaced this year brought new focus to Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s iron grip on power in state government. He hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing. In a few weeks, Madigan’s colleagues in the chamber will decide whether it’s time for new blood or let him continue in a post he’s had for most of the past four decides — one that gives him continued power over what legislation lives or dies.
Happy New Year.
Government response to COVID-19 — and what it means for 2021
At the start of the month, the nation collectively celebrated news that a vaccine was ready. But in mid-December, Gov. Pritzker offered the first bit of news here that the federal government could be sending fewer vaccines than expected. As it turns out, the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed will fall short of its stated goal to inoculate 20 million people by year’s end, to the frustration of states and health officials trying to schedule the shots, The Associated Press reports.
Wait and see: President-elect Biden, who takes office Jan. 20, has pledged “100 million shots in the first 100 days.”
Chicagoan Rochelle Sykes told CNN she worries her West Side neighborhood — a grocery and pharmacy desert in a time when chain drugstores will take a central role in doling out inoculations — will be left out when the COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available next year.
Sykes’ big-picture take should leave elected leaders, business owners who’ve enjoyed government tax breaks and everyone else a little sheepish about the will — or lack thereof — to address long-standing inequities plaguing poor communities: “If you can come up with a vaccine in a year, why are we sitting in a community where there is no grocery store with fresh fruits and vegetables?” Read the story or watch the video here.
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Today: Illinois is reinstating federal jobless aid programs as part of a $900 billion pandemic relief package, the Tribune’s Abdel Jimenez reports.
Today: Push for $2,000 checks appears dead in Senate after Mitch McConnell adds poison pills: Read The AP story here.
Next year: State and local government leaders will make their case to a new administration after failing to win federal government relief this time around. President Trump and other Republicans balked at the aid, saying Democratic-led states and cities were looking for a bailout after years of fiscal mismanagement. Mayor Lightfoot says the pandemic erased $800 million in revenue this year, and the bulk of the $1.2 billion deficit she had to close in next year’s budget is tied to projected shortfalls as the pandemic wears on. For his part, Gov. Pritzker recently announced a $700 million round of spending cuts to begin dealing with a $3.9 billion deficit — $2 billion of it tied to lost tax receipts during the pandemic.
Data points: More than 126,000 vaccinations had been administered in the state, Illinois public health officials announced today, while 7,374 new COVID-19 cases had been diagnosed in the last 24 hours with 178 additional deaths.
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How the 2020 election spills into 2021
This year’s election cycle delivered electoral victories to Biden on the national stage and locally to Marie Newman, who bested U.S. Rep. and fellow Democrat Dan Lipinski in the March primary.
Newman takes the reins as the congressman for the 3rd District, which stretches from Chicago’s Southwest Side to the suburbs, on Sunday when the new Congress is sworn in. But Trump continues to suggest he’ll fight Biden’s win, calling on his supporters to “never give up” and protest in Washington, D.C., Jan. 5, the same day a joint session of Congress holds a ceremonial count of Electoral College votes to cement the election results.
It also saw Republican billionaire Ken Griffin prevail over billionaire Gov. Pritzker in the push to overhaul Illinois’ tax code. The governor was pushing a constitutional amendment to get rid of the state’s flat income tax and replace it with a graduated income tax that he said was aimed at making wealthier residents pay more.
Pritzker and Griffin dumped millions into their respective pro and con campaigns. While ads in favor of the measure said it was a more equitable way of taxing residents, Republicans billed it as another money grab by fiscally irresponsible Democrats.
Now Pritzker is leaning on Republican legislators who fought the measure to come up with a way to mop up the river of red ink that began spilling long before he took office and was exacerbated by the pandemic. The spring budget session should be a brawl.
With Pritzker halfway through his first term and Mayor Lightfoot hitting that mark in May, we may see their first challengers for a second term come out of the woodwork.
George Floyd, Anjanette Young and the calls for police reform
The death of George Floyd at the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in May — captured on video and beamed across the world — felt like a turning point in a country where a disproportionate number of African American people have been killed by law enforcement. In Chicago and elsewhere, largely peaceful protests followed Floyd’s death, but so did unrest and looting in business districts as calls for defunding the police and reforms grew louder.
Issues of racial justice flared anew in recent weeks here in Chicago after video was made public of white officers mistakenly raiding the home of a Black social worker — shown naked, handcuffed and distraught as she told them 40-plus times they had the wrong home. While the raid happened before Lightfoot took office and she hired Superintendent David Brown, her administration’s Law Department tried to stop CBS-Ch. 2 from airing the raid footage and attempted to sanction the social worker, Anjanette Young, over the video’s release. The administration filed paperwork urging a judge not to impose sanctions on Young or her attorney.
Just released emails from the mayor’s office show Lightfoot was told by staff in November 2019 that the Young raid was “pretty bad,” the Tribune’s Gregory Pratt report is reporting. He notes, “The mistaken raid on Young’s home in February 2019 has become a major crisis for Lightfoot, who initially said she had only learned of it earlier this month after CBS aired police body camera footage that showed Young, who was naked and handcuffed, repeatedly telling officers who barged into her home that they had the wrong place.”
Lightfoot’s already facing scrutiny on police reform. As the Tribune’s Dan Hinkel reported over the summer, City Hall missed more than 70% of its deadlines during the first year of the court-overseen process of overhauling the Chicago Police Department. A watchdog report detailed the city’s sluggish progress in enacting the consent decree, a wide-ranging court order aimed at forcing reforms to training, discipline and supervision in the troubled department.
It was born of the November 2015 release of video showing white police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting Black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times.
U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, a Chicago Democrat, sent a letter in recent days to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler requesting hearings to examine “civil rights abuses perpetrated by police departments across the country and the Chicago Police Department, in particular.”
“While we are fortunate that Ms. Young was not killed in this case, her treatment is, nonetheless, demoralizing and the trauma she, and people across the country, feels is equally raw,” Rush wrote, pointing to the 1969 police killing of Fred Hampton during a raid at his home. Rush and Hampton were fellow members of the Illinois Black Panther Party.
A year into legalized weed, the green rolls in, but social equity hits a wall
The Sun-Times Tom Schuba writes: “Nearly a year after the legalization of recreational marijuana in Illinois, the state has failed to meet its promised diversity goals for the businesses licensed to be part of what’s expected to be a billion-dollar industry.”
To wit: “Not one social equity license has been issued and there’s still not one licensed cannabis busi
ness in the state with a majority owner who is a person of color,” Ross Morreale, a cannabis entrepreneur, attorney and consultant, writes in a just-published Tribune Op-Ed.
Pandemic, legal issues cause delays: The Pritzker administration has indefinitely delayed the issuance of licenses for 75 new recreational marijuana retail stores, due to be awarded May 1. The pandemic played a role in that. Then in September, the governor’s office announced just 21 applicants received perfect scores to qualify for a tie-breaking lottery to award the licenses, my colleague Robert McCoppin wrote.
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But some included politically connected or wealthy white owners, though the law was meant to encourage social equity applicants from areas hardest hit by the war on drugs. Lawsuits followed.
The money: The combined recreational and medical cannabis sales in Illinois are likely to exceed $1 billion in the debut year— with $100 million-plus in tax revenues, the Tribune’s McCoppin wrote in a piece earlier this week.
The state is approaching $1 billion in sales, with $100 million-plus in tax revenues pouring in: As the Tribune’s Robert Channick writes, “The year 2020 dawned with thousands of people lined up, some overnight, waiting to be among the first to buy legal recreational marijuana in Illinois.
“As the long, strange year comes to an end, people are lined up at food banks, to get coronavirus nasal swabs and, in some cases, to be among the first to receive a vaccine that may mark the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Read the rest of the story here.
Illinois Supreme Court to decide fate of last contested medical marijuana growing license in state, Robert McCoppin and Sarah Freishtat report in the Tribune.
New year brings new laws – and a plan for state legislators to reconvene for first time since May
From the Tribune’s Jamie Munks: “The Illinois House will reconvene in Springfield starting Jan. 8, for the first time since May and as Speaker Michael Madigan’s continued leadership over the chamber hangs in question.”
Context: “The return to Springfield ahead of the Jan. 13 inauguration of the next Illinois General Assembly comes as a group of 19 House Democrats have come out and said they won’t support” Madigan’s bid for another term as speaker. The defections leave him short of the 60 votes he’d need to retain the post. Read the rest of the story, which notes the Senate also may be eyeing a return, here.
New year, new laws including insulin price caps, minimum wage hike: The Tribune’s Munks and Dan Petrella write, “One of the side effects of the coronavirus pandemic was a drastically shortened spring session of the General Assembly, which means far fewer laws taking effect on New Year’s Day than in a typical year. But some new laws including caps on insulin prices and a $1 hike in the minimum wage kick in Friday. More here.
Chicago’s new speed limit law kicks in: My Tribune colleague John Byrne notes, “With 2021 upon us, Mayor Lori Lightfoot will soon end Chicago motorists’ carefree days of driving up to 9 miles per hour over the posted speed limit.” You’ll start getting warnings on Jan. 1, but city officials aren’t saying when tickets will start being written.
Programming note: The Spin will take a brief New Year’s hiatus and return on Monday. See you then.
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