Three years ago, Brandon Johnson walked into City Hall holding what most Chicago mayors never get: a governing majority built on progressives, organized labor and Black political leadership, owing nothing to the machine or to downtown money. Since last year’s budget battle, he has been burning through it, one fight at a time.
The debt fight shows how little is left. Last month, 32 aldermen voted to require 30 votes instead of 26 before the city borrows another dollar. The mayor vetoed it. Recently, 33 voted to override him, one more than before and one shy of the 34 needed. Losing the argument on debt, the mayor switched to race and motive.
After the first vote, he called the ordinance a “three-fifths compromise.” Three-fifths of the council is 30 votes, the same bar Springfield sets for state debt. The Three-Fifths Compromise wrote into the Constitution that an enslaved Black person counted as three-fifths of a human being. One is a voting rule. The other is a stain on the nation’s founding. Asked whether he was accusing colleagues of racial motives, the mayor said he meant impact, not intent. Nobody reaches for the most loaded phrase in American history by accident.
Then he escalated. That same week, at the City Club, he cast the coming election as “billionaires versus the Brandon Johnson Coalition” and suggested that aldermen who grant tax breaks to billionaires “are causing an increase in crime.” After the vote, he brushed off his critics as “still adjusting to a progressive agenda.”
I’m one of those critics. I signed the City Council’s Budget Accountability Coalition’s letter to the mayor with demands for the budget alongside nine other members of the aldermanic Black Caucus. I voted to override his veto. I’d do both again tomorrow. The mayor’s team wants Chicago to picture us as downtown aldermen taking orders from LaSalle Street. So meet the coalition.
Start with his own Finance Committee chair, Ald. Pat Dowell, who endorsed Johnson when he was an underdog and got the most powerful assignment a mayor hands out. Add the chair of the Black Caucus, Ald. Stephanie Coleman. Add the aldermen he hand-picked to run council committees in 2023, jobs a new mayor gives only to people he plans to govern with. Then add members of the Progressive Caucus, including me. I ran as a progressive and came to City Hall to help a progressive mayor deliver. I don’t need lessons on adjusting to a progressive agenda.
These weren’t his opponents in 2023. They were his foundation. With them, he never had to beg for 26 votes. Now count who has walked out the door: his own finance chair, the chair of the Black Caucus, committee chairs he appointed and progressives who once treated his victory as their own.
Then count what he has left. On the most basic question of his own borrowing power, the mayor held 17 votes out of 50. He reminded reporters afterward that 26 votes is still a majority. True enough. He couldn’t find 26. When 33 aldermen, many of them people he once counted as his own, line up against him, the problem isn’t in the council chamber. It’s on the fifth floor.
Even the people still with him can see it. One alderman who voted to sustain the veto told him from the floor that better relations with the council would have spared everyone this fight. A West Side colleague who voted to override said people she called bullies warned her that constituents still recovering from flooding would lose help unless she fell in line. Coalitions don’t collapse overnight. They erode one relationship at a time. The mayor told the Tribune last year that failing to keep his coalition engaged was “an error on my part.” He diagnosed the problem, then went right back to labeling the people he lost.
Recently, the mayor’s floor leader pushed the race argument further, telling the council that independence and oversight come up only when the mayor is Black and asking where this concern was under Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel. The history he invoked is real. Harold Washington faced a council organized to keep him from governing. But look at this roll call. Black Caucus members from the South and West sides were among the 33 who voted to override Johnson. The borrowing rule would bind whoever sits in that chair, this mayor and every mayor after him.
And the record demolishes the mayor’s claim that 30 votes would choke off investment in the South and West sides. Every bond proposal he has brought to this council but one cleared 30 votes. The exception was last year’s $830 million deal, structured to pay only interest until 2045. The city’s annual payments on it will grow to $136.9 million by 2050, nearly triple the 2028 payment, for a total cost of about $2 billion. That is the only borrowing this rule would have stopped. With debt and pensions already swallowing about 40% of the operating budget, that isn’t race. It’s arithmetic, and my constituents will be paying the bill for 30 years.
Race matters in this city. Its map still carries the scars of decisions about where Black families could live, where banks would lend and where government would invest. When we see racism, we should name it, loudly. That’s exactly why that history shouldn’t be spent shielding a borrowing rule from Black colleagues who disagree. Black political power includes the right of Black elected officials to tell a Black mayor no. Demanding that everyone who looks like us vote alike once we reach the table isn’t empowerment. It’s obedience.
So here is where I stand. I’ll fight for investment in communities like mine. I won’t vote for borrowing without discipline. And I won’t accept that questioning this administration’s math makes me a tool of corporations, a cause of crime or a party to anything resembling the Three-Fifths Compromise.
The mayor keeps invoking the “Brandon Johnson Coalition” as if it were still standing. Before he sorts Chicago into sides, he should ask who was with him when he walked into City Hall, who’s still there and why so many of us left. He won’t like the answer.
Until Johnson faces himself, he should stop telling Chicagoans who we are.
Ald. Desmon Yancy represents the 5th Ward on the Chicago City Council.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].