It was high noon at City Hall on September 25. The City Council meeting was supposed to have started an hour earlier, but impatient alders were cooling their heels. Mayor Brandon Johnson was still in his fifth-floor office, trying to hash out a new slate of committee chairs with the Black and Latino caucuses. He couldn’t get a deal done. “This is the most inept mayor I’ve ever seen,” one alderperson grumbled at the time.

Traditionally, Chicago mayors have been able to dictate the chairs of City Council committees. But the days of domineering mayors, which date back to the rule of Richard J. Daley, seem to have come to an end. Thanks to two consecutive weak, politically inexperienced mayors — Johnson and Lori Lightfoot — the council has been clawing back power it lost long ago and operating more as a coequal branch of government than a rubber stamp.

The committee chairs fiasco isn’t the only time Johnson has had to deal with defiant alders. Last year, they voted 50–0 against his plan for a $300 million property tax increase. This June, they passed a snap curfew he opposed, leading to the first mayoral veto in 19 years. His 2024 budget barely made it through the council, 27–23, a big change from the years when budgets passed with only one or two dissents. And when Johnson canceled the city’s contract for the gunshot detection system ShotSpotter, the council voted 33–14 to overturn his decision. Since it was an executive matter, he was not bound by the vote, but it was another sign that the council wasn’t going to simply abide by his wishes.

It’s not just that Johnson lacks political savvy. He also lacks the tools that past mayors used to bend the council to their will: patronage and money. “The old political machine under Richard J. Daley, and later Richard M. Daley, has broken down,” says Dick Simpson, a retired political science professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who served on the City Council in the 1970s. “Under Rahm Emanuel, it was just money. He had $32 million [in campaign funds] and spent it to support aldermen. There were only a few aldermen who opposed him.” Johnson, on the other hand, “doesn’t have anything he can threaten them with, unless they need the Chicago Teachers Union. They think they can get elected without him.”

Johnson also doesn’t have a majority of alders he can rely on to back his proposals. The Progressive Caucus is his staunchest ally, but that’s only 19 of 50 alders. To win a vote, Johnson faces the challenge of attracting support from either Northwest and Southwest Side conservatives or the moderate Common Sense Caucus, formed last year to oppose Johnson’s budget and composed mostly of alders from downtown and the lakefront. He also has to balance the interests of the Black and Latino caucuses, which, despite their memberships with the ideological caucuses, prioritize the communities they represent, as when they objected to his council reorganization plan.

On paper, Chicago has always had a form of government with a strong council and a weak mayor. According to the municipal code, which dates back to 1837, the council has the power to defy the mayor’s authority. But the only time it operated that way in recent history, at least until lately, was the Council Wars of Harold Washington’s tenure, when 29 white alders blocked the mayor’s appointments and legislation and voted themselves into chairmanships.

At the beginning of Johnson’s term, Alderperson Scott Waguespack tested the mayor’s power by drawing up a plan that allowed the council to choose its own committee chairs. Johnson defeated that but has since been losing authority. “If he does get back into office, the council will decide for itself who its leadership will be,” says a former alderperson who served under Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel. And what if someone else is elected? “Unless it’s a strong presence, like a Rahm or a Daley, it’ll be much more difficult for the mayor to decree this is his team. Part of the culture of the city government was this great deference to whoever happened to be mayor. The longer this goes on, and the fewer aldermen who were around in the old days, even if the next mayor is more competent, you’re not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle.”

Last year’s budget process was a prime example of Johnson’s difficulty in finding support to get his proposals passed, Waguespack points out. The mayor had to promise new parks and other projects in various wards to win alders’ votes. Though he did manage to get the budget passed in mid-December, two weeks before the end-of-the-year deadline, Waguespack was not impressed: “He doesn’t have control of the room. I would say there’s a permanent shift, but that doesn’t mean a future mayor can’t get consensus.”

Alderperson Andre Vasquez, a member of the Progressive Caucus who broke with Johnson in voting against last year’s budget, sees the shift as an “evolution” of city governance. He would like to see the council eventually acquire the staff to write the city’s budget, a power that was usurped by Richard J. Daley, who began the current practice of mayors overseeing that task.

Even without that ability, the council will have a large say in Johnson’s 2025 budget, which the mayor presented at the October council meeting. Johnson has to close a $1.19 billion gap. To do so, he wants to revive the employee head tax, eliminated in 2013, at a rate of $21 per worker. Alderperson Brian Hopkins doesn’t think the mayor has the votes. And Alderperson Raymond Lopez questioned Johnson’s plan for a social media tax that would bite Meta, X, and TikTok for 50 cents per Chicago user over 100,000. Just as he did last year, Johnson is going to have to make compromises — something the Daleys and Emanuel never had to do. But then, they never faced a budget situation this dire.

As far as Lopez is concerned, Chicago doesn’t need another all-powerful mayor. It needs a strong council, since those members more directly represent the people: “If we have aldermen who are serious about government, you will have a City Council that will make it more difficult for the ascension of a kingmaker mayor.”