Mayor Biss is running for Congress. If he was seduced in Springfield, imagine what would happen in D.C.
Evanston Illinois Mayor Daniel Biss has announced he is running for the congressional seat now held by the long-time north shore progressive Congress member Jan Schakowsky.
No surprise there.
Biss has had his eyes on that seat since he was a state representative and then when he was a state senator.
In 2017 Biss was tired of waiting for Shakowsky to retire and took a failed detour from his quest for a congressional seat to run for Illinois Governor.
That plan hit a wall when he asked my Chicago alderman at the time, Carlos Rosa, to be his running mate.
Oops.
Rosa, it turned out, had expressed some support for BDS, boycotting Israel investments.
When that came out, Rosa tried to explain that he only supported “having a conversation about it.”
Even that wasn’t a good enough explanation for his heresy and Biss dumped him as his running mate.
The result is that Illinois has JB Pritzker as governor.
So far, so good as far as I’m concerned.
Back in the Os, when Biss was in the state legislature, Biss was the face of public pension theft.
He was everywhere, claiming his mathematical skills (he was a math major at the University of Chicago) convinced him that paying teachers and other state employees what they were promised would lead to a financial crisis for the state.
I was part of a group of north suburban teachers that went to his office on a number of occasions to challenge him on his math.
“I’m just looking for savings,” he said.
“Your ‘savings’ are theft,” we said.
A video (no longer available on Youtube) of the exchange went viral.
After the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that pension theft was unconstitutional, Biss changed his tune.
“I was seduced by the culture of Springfield,” he said of his change of heart.
By the way, it is over a decade since Biss predicted economic collapse. Illinois has its economic issues but pensions aren’t the cause.
So, now Biss is running for congress.
But if he was so easily seduced by the culture of what is known around Illinois as Spring Patch, imagine what would happen to him in that pit of sophisticated corruption in Washington.
*No AI was used in the writing of this piece. All errors in spelling and sentence structure are my own .