Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is someone we've had on before, John McGuinness. He's the George C. Dix professor in constitutional law at Northwestern University. And he's the author of Accelerating Democracy. He's also a contributing editor of City Journal. And he's got a brand new piece called Flexing Their Muscle,

which discusses the Chicago Teachers Union's recent school shutdown, which is what we'll talk about today.

So, John, thanks very much for joining us.

Glad to be here.

So, yes, the Chicago Teachers Union is, as you note, an incredibly powerful force in the windy city.

You describe it as having an iron grip on the city's politics.

You know, people may remember it four schools closed a couple of years ago during a very contentious two-week strike.

And the city schools were all remote in the 2020-2020 pandemic school year.

So now the union has secured another temporary shutdown of in-person schooling.

So, you know, there's ongoing discussions to restore

in-person education. Maybe, you know, you can give us an update on some of that. But the damage is

being done again. So what exactly is the background of this, you know, this recent shutdown? Is it

specifically about Omicron or is it perhaps a political show of muscle?

Well, I think it's both. Certainly the Omicron virus is the incident that has sparked this latest

showdown between the mayor and the unions, but there's longstanding bad blood

between them.

And it's also clearly an incident in which the teachers union is really objecting because

the mayor is not cleared, or the person running the schools

has not cleared the protocols with the union beforehand. And while the union, at least currently,

in his current contract, doesn't have rights to prevent that.

It's, I think, objecting to its lack of ability to be really to sign off on what has happened.

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