Eight hour meeting at City Hall! (RANT WARNING)

[SoxFan]

AAAAAAUUUUUUGGGHHH!

My god. Eight hours for a meeting that accomplished absolutely nothing.

The issue was a tax cap amendment to the city charter. The measure receieved the requisitenumber of petition signatures, and everything was filed on time.

But...

The municipal employee unions are apoplectic, and leaned on 8 of the 14 aldermen to keep the amendment from appearing on the November ballot. The old guard Democratic aldermen refused to move the question forward, and want to shuffle it off to a low-turnout special election.

Now, I have grave reservations about the spending cap, and probably won't support it. But I find it insulting that 8 political insiders think that they have the right to deny 115,000 residents their say on a very important policy proposal.

So, three of us who are Democrats found ourselves siding with the two Republicans and an independent. We wound up on the same side as the oddball Ron Paul activists and the local conservative newspaper. But our stance was based on procedural fairness and a respect for the democratic process, not in any love of the underlying measure. Nonetheless, I fully expect that this means I'll have an old guard Dem opponent, and will be tarred as anti-worker, etc.

This despite the fact that my wife is an SEIU member, my father in law belongs to APWU, and my grandfather was a teamster...