By Illinois Review
Illinois Democratic State Representative La Shawn Ford has once again filed legislation that creates an official mechanism to recall a Chicago Mayor – a measure that he has supported in previous legislative sessions dating back to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
House Bill 1084 “establishes a procedure for a special recall election to recall the Mayor of Chicago and the election of a successor mayor at a special successor election or special runoff election.”
But the introduction of this legislation has a greater significance this year as Mayor Brandon Johnson’s approval rating sits at 15 percent – a historic low for any mayor since Chicago’s incorporation in 1833. The city’s crime problems, lack of police resources available to protect the community and the migrant crisis is turning residents and his own city council members against him.
Since his surprise election in the Spring of 2023, his administration has been mired in controversy, highlighting his inexperience and inability to manage a big city like Chicago.
In 2023, Mayor Johnson’s Chicago City Council Floor Leader Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th Ward) resigned as leader after bullying Ald. Emma Mitts (37th Ward) during a special meeting to discuss a referendum regarding Chicago’s sanctuary city status.
Reports revealed that Ramirez-Rosa was physically blocking Mitts from entering the council chamber floor to prevent a quorum of 26 council members who were going to vote on a measure that would create a referendum on whether or not Chicago should remain a sanctuary city. The vote couldn’t take place until 26 members were on the floor, which Ramirez-Rosa, who serves as Mayor Johnson’s floor leader, was trying to prevent.
Witnesses also revealed that Ramirez-Rosa was threatening council members that if they entered the chamber floor to vote on the proposed measure, that he would use his position as chairman of the Zoning Committee to punish them – and effectively block any future requests for help from his committee.
It’s estimated that over 20,000 migrants have arrived in Chicago in 2023, costing more than $400 million – with 25 buses arriving each day dropping off an average of 1,250 migrants around the city.
In November, the Chicago City Council rejected a $300 million property tax increase proposed by Johnson by a vote of 50-0 – leaving the mayor and his team humiliated and struggling to come up with alternative solutions to address the nearly $1 billion budget shortfall.
The mayor’s office is also dealing with a scandal and includes multiple complaints of racism, sexual harassment, intimidation and misogyny involving his former communications director Ronnie Reese, who was fired last November.
The irony is that the mayor often invokes race and plays the racism card whenever he’s asked uncomfortable questions by the press – including questions about the city’s high crime, his administration’s slow start and his recent trip to London that included a Bears game – telling a local reporter, “I have to be very honest with you, it’s pretty jacked up the way you framed that. It is. It is. It’s disrespectful and condescending that the black man is going to London for a game. And people get away with that too much.”
Mayor Johnson also bizarrely compared those who disagreed with him recently about school spending to slavery, saying, “When our people wanted to be liberated and emancipated in this country, the argument was, ‘you can’t free Black people because it would be too expensive. They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people.”
And following President Donald Trump’s historic victory last year, and his return to the White House, Johnson once again invoked racism by claiming that the president-elect is a “threat” to Black families despite Trump earning more support from Black voters than any Republican in nearly 50 years.
With more than a year and a half into his term, Johnson is already viewed as a lame duck and ineffective mayor – and the numbers prove it. And he’s losing the support of his fellow Democrats on the city council – representing a very bad sign for the embattled mayor as he struggles to find solutions to the city’s most pressing issues.
