When City Councilor Emily Norton and four colleagues stood up Wednesday night to invoke a parliamentary procedure known as a charter privilege to postpone setting a date for the Northland referendum, I couldn’t help but recall this wonderful cartoon from Mark Marderosian which ran in the Newton TAB in July 2008.
My memory is a little fuzzy about what happened in 2008 but as I recall it was the tail end of a controversial budget debate when Aldermen Paul Coletti, Ted-Hess Mahan, Susan Albright and Sydra Schnipper rose to prevent a vote rejecting Mayor David Cohen’s city budget. Because of the timing, the move meant that Cohen’s budget was approved by default, in spite of the fact that Cohen did not have the needed votes. (If anyone reading this can fill in the gap please do.)
Anyway, while the 2008 charter action achieved what it was intended to do (i.e. an allowed-under-the-rules end run past the will of their colleagues), it’s not clear that Wednesday’s stunt by Councilors Norton, Ciccone, Kalis, Markiewicz and Malakie will. (Their move, according to Right Size’s treasurer may hurt the very group they were trying to help.) But the real loss may be that we no longer have Mark contributing his toons to memorialize this latest moment.
BTW, I spoke to Mark today to get his permission to republish this, he’s semi retired, happy and writing the Great American novel. You can see a few more of his Newton cartoons here or if you Google him,
Mark M.,
If you’re reading this, do you remember when you were the guest on an entire Jackie Morrissey NewTV show wearing a funny drawn paper bag over your head — joking to be a Newton resident against the 2002 override with fear of being exposed. You were so deadpan in doing it, never laughing during the complete performance!
If NewTV has a video of that episode, I think it’s the funniest show ever on NewTV. (And thanks for being a good sport in doing it for our anti-override side.)
Your cartoons/drawings have been the greatest (albeit I wasn’t always in agreement with the political message).
Mark is a world-class political cartoonist. His work was the first thing I’d look for when opening the Newton TAB. Such a bummer they let him get away.
“When you start upending a process to achieve your personal, political goal, whatever it might be, that is a slippery slope,” Norton said. “You chip away at the fairness of our process.” This is a quote from the Globe article. I really think Norton is doing exactly this by trying to use a political maneuver to not have the special election on March 3 – the day of the Presidential primaries. A day that will certainly have a higher turnout than a randomly selected date. Isn’t the point of having the referendum (which I don’t think is the right thing to do, we elect a city council for these decisions) to get as many people to vote as possible? Or is the point of the referendum to “achieve a personal, political goal”.
I don’t understand how someone who positions herself as a progressive Democrat could spearhead this blatant effort in voter suppression. Isn’t she supporting Elizabeth Warren? Because I’m confident Sen. Warren would not support what she did.
Worse for Councilor Norton, she damaged her progressive credentials without achieving her political outcome. Odds are the vote will be on March 3.
As I wrote earlier, on Wednesday Councilor Norton was playing checkers while President Albright was playing chess.
Amen, Emily! I am also opposed to the upending of a democratic process to serve personal or political goals. I would use stronger words than “unfair” to describe that kind of behavior.
Let’s say for example that 80% of voters opted for Newton to engage in a 2-year process of revising our charter and elected 9 respected members of the community to study the subject and propose changes. And let’s say that 2 weeks before residents were to vote on the 1.5 years of work of the elected commission, a city councilor docketed an item intended to mislead voters into thinking that if they voted No they could still have a smaller city council. That would be outrageous, especially if the docketing councilor(s) hid from voters the fact that he/she didn’t have the power to make the docket item a reality, and offered no education to voters on the dramatic implications of the “3rd option” council configuration. Another way to upend the democratic charter reform process would be if a city councilor blanketed the city with a flier of lies and half truths about the elected commission’s proposal beginning 9 months before the commission had even finalized that proposal.
@Rhanna — Still on the charter? You and YES could have put the alleged “tactic” to bed with a short statement:
“Dear Newton Voters — The Mayor will NEVER advance 8-8 to the statehouse. He is entirely on our side. The council can’t overrule his veto, even with a supermajority of 17 votes. While we say we want a smaller council, that absolutely can’t come at the expense of retaining any ward-elected representation. We’d rather have the council be 50% bigger.”
Seriously — A little transparency would have gone a long way. Instead, you repeated said the council would never vote to downsize itself.
Jack, Not here to rehash. I’m just pointing out the irony that the elected official complaining about political processes being upended was the architect of the Mother of All Upendings of democratic processes in Newton.
Mark Maderosian, we hardly knew thee! One of the most inexplicable moves on the part of the Newton Tab – getting rid of you. They didn’t know how good th ey had it. A nail in the coffin :(
Jack – Also not into rehashing, but the people running the Yes campaign stated many times exactly what you suggested. In addition, the mayor was abundantly clear that he would not be (bullied into) signing a half baked idea concocted without study or deliberation designed to influence an election. BTW, the mayor never intervened or was involved in the charter review process or campaign.
Like it or not, Rhanna’s version is spot on. No irony here-Emily Norton has never met a pot she didn’t enjoy stirring.