Outgoing Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg urged the City Council Wednesday to flex its muscle in a way that it never has: by establishing rules to go after bad behavior by Council members.
Witzburg wants the Rules Committee to fill the “wide gap” between criminal and ethics code violations that her office is empowered to investigate — and “conduct unbecoming” by Council members. Those alderpersons, Witzburg says, “reflect poorly on the body as a whole and further erode public trust in government.”
In recent years, several alderpersons have appeared to cross that line without punishment or consequence.
Mayor Brandon Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote to rescue his then-floor leader and Zoning Committee Chair Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) from censure after Ramirez-Rosa was accused of bullying colleagues in an attempt to prevent the Council from approving a non-binding referendum that would have allowed voters to weigh in on whether Chicago should remain a sanctuary city.
Ramirez-Rosa was forced to resign from both leadership positions, but later moved up the ladder when Johnson chose him to become superintendent and CEO of the Chicago Park District.
Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) survived an effort to remove him as Housing Committee chair after he had attended a rally outside City Hall where an American flag was burned to protest U.S. support for Israel.
Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd) neither apologized nor was removed as chair of the City Council Committee on Health and Human Relations — even though the Council’s lone Jewish member Debra Silverstein (50th) demanded both — after Rodriguez-Sanchez wrote a Facebook post accompanied by a picture of herself and her son that said, “Looking for an anti-Zionist pediatrician for this baby. Give me your recs.”
Any of those actions could have been investigated by the Rules Committee as a potential violation of the “aspirational code of conduct” for aldermanic behavior included in the ethics code, Witzburg said.
But she added there are no clear rules and procedures to “meaningfully evaluate and adjudicate” those potential violations because the Rules Committee has not fulfilled its responsibility to create those rules.
“It has to mean something that we have a City Council committee which is charged with regulating the conduct of members. That is a recognition that the conduct of members needs to be regulated,” Witzburg told the Sun-Times.
“There are no ground rules in place to determine when and for what somebody might be censured, how that process should work, what sort of hearings should accompany that. It can’t be that this is a wheel that gets invented every time someone does something that people are unhappy about. That’s not fair to anybody involved.”
Witzburg said the Rules Committee has yet to respond to her advisory on the issue.
Rules Committee Chair Michelle Harris (8th) said she hasn’t read Witzburg’s advisory, but added the inspector general appears to raise a “valid point.”
“What I don’t like to do is get ahead of the body and speak on what the body would want,” Harris told the Sun-Times. “It would take us to sit down and have an executive meeting to talk about what items need to be censured. That’s a valid point that, if the body says they want to do something, that’s one thing. But I don’t get to pick for them.”
Sigcho-Lopez said he’s all for the Rules Committee flexing its muscle and would even “subject myself to scrutiny.”
That could have happened a few months ago when Sigcho-Lopez was accused of unbecoming conduct after he was evicted from a hearing held to determine why an artwork viewed as antisemitic was placed on display at the Cultural Center. During that hearing, Sigcho-Lopez had accused Ald. Bill Conway (34th) of being a “white supremacist.”
Sigcho-Lopez noted that there was “no accountability” after Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) made what he later admitted was a “tasteless joke” on X about “people in Yemen being bombed with cell phone devices.”
“Trivializing acts of terrorism is disrespecting the decorum and the ethics and the common sense of what City Council members should do to respect their own seats,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “The inspector general makes a case that there have to be criteria and analyses of the facts. There’s a need to clarify those things so they’re not used politically as a way to weaponize without any facts, but just to try to create chaos and disruption in the City Council.”
Former Ethics Board Chair William Conlon said the City Council should “move to police itself,” but its members have “never had the strength as a body to do it.
“Imposing rules on yourself [is] always difficult and they’ve had great difficulty imposing rules on themselves,” Conlon said.