A politically ambitious Midwestern mayor took the stage at Karamu House last week. Pete Buttigieg was there, too.
Buttigieg and that other mayor — Cleveland’s Justin Bibb — were making good on the snow check they took after winter weather delayed a joint event in January. President Joe Biden’s former transportation secretary, Buttigieg previously served as mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
One topic of their fireside chat: making the industrial Midwest great again. They didn’t put it that way, of course. Buttigieg said cities shouldn’t just go back to their past of Cleveland’s Standard Oil and the South Bend automaker Studebaker.
“Instead, what we can do is we can look back at those innovators and leaders of the past and notice that what was really special about them was how focused they were on the future,” Buttigieg said.
The Midwest has plenty that makes it special, from the water of the Great Lakes to the “muscle memory” of knowing how to make things, he said.
The talk could be wonky. (One audience question asked about a Biden-era transportation program to link neighborhoods divided by highways.) But that seemed just fine for the 100 or so people in attendance, many of them City Hall staffers and civic leaders.
Bibb previewed a national political project he’s been working on. He wants to connect Democratic mayors in Republican-dominated states. It’s called the Blue Cities/Red States Coalition.
Cleveland’s mayor described it as a group “where you have common-sense, pragmatic, centrist mayors in blue cities in red states, who are fighting against preemption, fighting against extreme MAGA governors and extreme MAGA Republican-led legislatures, but still getting stuff done.”
Blue Cities/Red States won a grant last year from the Moderate Power Venture Fund, a project of the Democratic think tank Third Way. The venture fund gives out grants of $50,000 to $250,000 to “empower the next generation of center-left leaders,” according to its website. (Bibb spoke at a Third Way conference earlier this year.)
A possible 2028 White House contender, Buttigieg spun through the Buckeye State to help out Ohio Democrats. He visited U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur in Toledo and spoke at a reception in Cleveland for Senate candidate Sherrod Brown.
Cleveland asks for flexibility in ending consent decree
A federal judge will have another chance this week to say what he thinks of Cleveland’s effort to end more than a decade of court oversight of the police. Last month, U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver said the city’s move surprised him.
The court hearing on Cleveland’s consent decree is scheduled for March 18. Officially the topic is the latest status report on the city’s progress — but it’s hard to imagine that Cleveland’s push to leave the decree won’t come up.
Cleveland police have been under a consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department since 2015. The decree is a 100-plus-page, 462-paragraph legal document that lays out how police must change the way they use force, conduct searches and more.
Although City Hall wants out of the decree, at last check, Cleveland police hadn’t fulfilled every paragraph of it. Instead, Cleveland says it has come up with a “durable remedy” for the unconstitutional policing that landed the city in the consent decree in the first place.
The term “durable remedy” appears in a 2009 Supreme Court opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in the case Horne v. Flores. Writing for the conservative majority, Alito said courts should use a “flexible standard” when deciding whether to release state and local officials from consent decrees.
Cleveland and the DOJ cite Horne in their motion to terminate the decree. They argue the city has achieved the decree’s “core requirements” for use of force, searches and crisis intervention.
Just how durable is the city’s progress? City Hall says it is ready to take local control of policing. Advocates of police reform are concerned Cleveland will backslide.