The Spin: Republican US Rep. Adam Kinzinger compares GOP to ‘The Titanic’ | Lightfoot silent on stolen city emails | Pressured by Biden administration, Chicago mayor delays decision on scrap shredder
Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who has opposed the GOP’s continued embrace of former President Donald Trump, said today that he thinks “maybe 10″ of his colleagues in Congress believe last year’s election was stolen and handed to President Joe Biden. He arrived at that math, he said during an interview on the National Press Club, because he’s accounting for people who are “not all that high IQ-ish on some things.”
Yesterday, Kinzinger compared the Republican Party to the Titanic and described Trump as a passenger in search of “women’s clothing,” to get to the front of the line for a life boat.
Helmut Jahn, the famed architect whose work includes the polarizing Thompson Center state office building in Chicago, has died. The 81-year-old was killed in a bicycling crash in suburban St. Charles. The Tribune’s Chris Jones writes about the “starchitect’s” life here. His death comes days after Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the Thompson Center was officially for sale, something preservationists fear will hasten its meeting with the wrecking ball.
“Jahn was one of the most inventive Chicago architects,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted Sunday, “whose impact on the city — from the skyline to the O’Hare tunnel — will never be forgotten. His architectural footprint will be felt & seen across the globe for generations to come.”
And after so many fits and starts, the Navy Pier flyover — a pedestrian byway over the Chicago River — is done. As Mayor Lightfoot noted at a ribbon cutting this morning, it took three mayors to get this thing done.
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US Rep. Adam Kinzinger says GOP is like the Titanic with Trump ‘running around and trying to find women’s clothing’ so he can board a lifeboat
U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Channahon Republican, compared the GOP to the Titanic during an appearance on CBS’ Sunday morning politics show “Face the Nation.”
He was talking about the intra-party conflict involving Trump in which U.S. House Republicans are considering whether to oust Wyoming U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney from her GOP leadership posts. Kinzinger represents Illinois’ 16th Congressional District which skirts the Chicago suburbs from the Indiana border, a portion of Rockford up to the Wisconsin line.
He told host John Dickerson: “Right now, it’s basically the Titanic. We’re like, you know, in the middle of this slow sink. We have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it’s fine. And meanwhile, as I’ve said, you know, Donald Trump’s running around trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat,” Kinzinger said. Watch the interview here. The Hill newspaper has more details here.
Kinzinger was one of a handful of House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump earlier this year and went on to establish the Country First Political Action Committee and movement in opposition to Trump.
During a virtual appearance today with the National Press Club, Kinzinger said he thinks that only a handful of his fellow U.S. House Republicans believe Trump’s claim that the November election was stolen from him, stopping short of calling some of them dumb.
“I truly, truly ... believe that maybe 10 of my fellow colleagues in the House believe that the election was stolen, maybe 10,” Kinzinger said. “And I say that because I, I’m putting room in there for there are probably just some people that are not really all that, you know, high IQ-ish on some things I guess.”
He added that he thinks there are certainly others who will, for political expedience, say they believe it was stolen. But Kinzinger says he hesitates to criticize those who make the political calculation that siding with Trump allows them to remain in Congress and push causes they believe in rather than challenge the former president and risk a primary election contest that could boot them from office. Watch here.
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Treasury launches $350 billion program to distribute aid to state and local governments
From The Associated Press: “The Treasury Department on Monday launched its $350 billion program to distribute aid to state and local governments, giving the U.S. economy an added boost as President Joe Biden sought to assure the country that stronger growth is coming.” Full story here.
“The aid is part of Biden’s larger $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that became law in March. Administration officials said payments could begin to go out in the coming days to eligible governments, allowing state, local, territorial and tribal officials to offset the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic.”
Perspective: “The announcement came after the government reported Friday that just 266,000 jobs were added in April — a miss that the president felt obligated to address from the White House on Monday.”
Dollars and cents: As part of the nearly $2 trillion relief package, Chicago’s in line to get just over $1.8 billion while Illinois state government was expected to get around $7.2 billion in relief money.
“The Treasury Department also issued detailed guidance to states explaining how it will determine if the money is being used properly and in which cases the relief funds could be recouped. If a state does cut taxes, it will have to demonstrate to the Treasury Department that it offset that lost revenue with spending cuts or another source of revenue that does not include the fiscal recovery funds,” The New York Times reports. “If the state cannot do that, Treasury can claw back that amount of money.”
Plenty at stake in politically charged debate over cap on state, local tax deductions
From the Tribune’s Rick Pearson: “As taxpayers face a May 17 tax filing deadline, Congress is negotiating the possible expansion or elimination of the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions — an issue of particular significance to residents of high tax states such as Illinois.
“Removing the cap, part of President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, is a politically fractious issue, even among Democrats, with some arguing it mainly favors the wealthy. President Joe Biden’s administration has delivered mixed signals on where it stands.
Before Trump’s jobs and tax cuts act, “taxpayers had been able to deduct all of their local property taxes, and either state income or sales taxes, along with mortgage interest, medical expenses and charitable giving, from their taxable federal income if they itemized their deductions,” Pearson writes.
One of the architects of the changes was then-U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam, a Wheaton Republican who a year later would lose his seat to Democrat Sean Casten in a campaign where the SALT cap — the acronym for the state and local tax deduction — became a significant issue.
The imposition of the cap by Republicans, Casten said in an interview this month, “was done very surgically and it was done specifically to penalize, not Democratic districts, but districts where voters have made a conscious choice to invest extra tax dollars in better schools, better roads.”
Conversely, “Republicans argued the uncapped deduction represented a federal subsidy of local Democratic tax policies.”
Earlier this month, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker joined with the Democratic governors of New York, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Oregon and Hawaii in a letter asking Biden to “relieve this immense financial burden and eliminate the SALT cap entirely.” Full story here.
Lightfoot orders new study of Southeast Side pollution after Biden EPA and neighborhood activists raise concerns about proposed scrap shredder
From the Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne: “Under pressure from the Biden administration, Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Friday indefinitely delayed making a final decision about a proposed scrap shredder in one of the nation’s most polluted areas.
“Lightfoot directed the Chicago Department of Public Health to conduct a more thorough investigation of environmental health risks in low-income, largely Latino and Black neighborhoods on the Southeast Side, where Ohio-based Reserve Management Group wants to shred cars and other metallic waste after closing a similar facility on the wealthy, predominantly white North Side.
“The mayor stepped in after Michael Regan, the new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, reminded Lightfoot the Southeast Side already ranks among the nation’s worst areas in various pollution categories the EPA relies on to determine where it should focus its attention.” Full story here.
ALSO: Mayor Lightfoot declined to discuss the cache of city of Chicago emails that were stolen during a data transfer to an outside law firm.
Asked about it at an unrelated news conference this morning, she raised questions about their credibility, especially after the hackers unsuccessfully sought ransoms from both the law firm and City Hall, the mayor said.
“I’ve seen it from my perspective as a lawyer representing clients, and oftentimes what happens is you get things either out of context or they’ve been manipulated to make a particular political statement,” said the mayor, who’s worked as a federal prosecutor and for a large corporate firm. “So I’m not going to be commenting on specific emails … because we have no way of knowing whether or not those emails are in fact legitimate, that they have been put online in their original form. And also somebody who has committed a federal crime of stealing emails, I don’t want to credit them as a credible news source. So I won’t be commenting on any specifics related to that.”
The hacked emails were sent or received by four former city employees over a two-year period, according to a news release issued about it Friday. No city computers or computer systems were compromised, according to the release. The Tribune’s Gregory Pratt’s story is here.
South Side Chicago Ald. David Moore joins Illinois secretary of state race
The small crowd of Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for Illinois secretary of state grew by one on over the weekend with South Side Ald. David Moore announcing he, too, would like to replace the retiring Jesse White next year.
Moore, 55, in his second term as alderman from the 17th Ward, on Saturday became the fifth announced candidate for the March 2022 nomination and the second member of the City Council along with 3rd Ward Ald. Pat Dowell. Other Democrats who’ve thrown their hat in the ring include one-time state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia and state Sen. Michael Hastings of Frankfort.
Ex-Illinois secretary of state worker gets 18 months in prison for defrauding the state out of nearly $350K: The Associated Press reports: “A former administrator with the Illinois Secretary of State’s office has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for defrauding the state out of nearly $350,000 over a nine-year period. Candace Wanzo, 58, of Centralia, was sentenced last week in federal court in Springfield to 18 months each on two counts of theft and one count of fraud. The sentences will be served concurrently, The State Journal-Register reported.
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