“Riding high in April, shot down in May,” Frank Sinatra sang in 1966. “That’s life.”
Chris Welch can certainly relate. He was riding high last April, having just been elected to the Democratic State Central Committee, the powerful party policy making group. Two months later, he was appointed one of four Executive Vice-Chairs to Chairman and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
From Proviso Township to the Cook County Democratic Party to the State Legislature and state Democratic policy making circles, Welch’s growing influence had an air of inevitability. The Democrat’s stunning success in expanding their supermajority in the Illinois House on Nov. 3 should have locked in his power going forward.
But days after the general election, as numerous new State Rep.-elects prepared to head down to Springfield in January, Welch found himself effectively reduced to “Speaker-reject” by his own House majority. Ironic for someone who once brushed aside a critic’s complaints by saying “You cannot take away the power of the majority!”
In a TV interview, Welch said he was just “doing the right thing.” But if he’d genuinely worked to do the right thing through the years, including with the Harry Benton sexual harassment case, he’d still be riding high.
Welch’s past finally caught up with him. Bob Herguth’s article in the Nov. 12 Sun-Times lays out an overview of Welch’s long history of misbehavior, including an incident where he angrily slammed an office door after a meeting with a female legislator.
“Same as it ever was,” I thought as I read the article. My very first experience with Welch was walking into the Board of Education room in Proviso East High School in late 2001 just as Welch was leaning forward, hands on the table, wide eyed and bellowing angrily at deposed board president Mike Manzo, telling him to shut up and sit down.
I caught it all on audio tape that night, and I very much regret not holding on to the cassette.
Like rocks dropped from a boat into a passing river, for years Welch’s numerous misdeeds, abuses and failures each plunked through the water’s surface and disappeared into the murk below.
But while people can overlook reports in small weekly newspapers or one-off coverage in the daily press, it’s a different story when the newspapers and TV and well-sourced political websites all turn their full focus on someone.
Welch’s abject failures financially and educationally at Proviso District 209, and his abusive management tactics, all well documented, became old news when he left for Springfield. “Ancient history,” as his apologists have said, as if the old, troubling stories were scribbled on papyrus scrolls stuffed in a clay cask in a remote cave.
“I made mistakes,” Welch has said, always with the caveat that he’d learned from them and become a better person. But never with any details acknowledged publicly, all damage control and no disclosure.
Now, how Welch was back then — and how he has continued to be behind his calm, polite demeanor — has been widely reported.
Welch has always been Welch. Long before he used the considerable resources of the political operation he inherited from Michael Madigan and spent big to primary one of his own Democratic caucus members, Mary Flowers, and exile State Rep. Cyril Nichols and State Rep. Fred Crespo, Welch was using whatever power he had at his disposal to punish those who opposed him, or simply just disagreed with him.
In at least one case, Welch struck back even after he’d won the battle. As the Sun-Times relates, back in 2002, Welch used D209 funds to have Manzo’s five year old daughter surveilled and videotaped outside her River Forest grade school, and Manzo and his kids videoed outside their new home.
Welch said at the time he was concerned that Manzo sending his children to out-of-district schools reflected poorly on D209. The truth is that Manzo had put his home up for sale and had not filed to run for re-election. He was walking out the door, moving to DuPage County, but Welch felt the need to give him one final kick as he departed.
There are copies of depositions of Welch and others under oath, and old newspaper articles, for those who care to understand the truth rather than Welch’s spin.
Welch has always been the insecure man who angrily texted a woman who’d dared to rebuff a hug, “I allowed them to be employed! And I’m the board president! Period! End of conversation. Things better change now. I won’t tolerate this disrespect. …”
“Winners do the work,” Welch is fond of saying. And he is without a doubt a hard worker when it comes to retail politics. But not so much when it comes to the unglamorous grind of governing.
It wasn’t Welch who convened a meeting at the Rising Sun Missionary Baptist Church in Austin in late September to hear from people suffering from the state’s failure to prevent two unqualified investors from running West Suburban Medical Center into the ground. It was Senate President Don Harmon and State Rep. Camille Lilly and concerned faith leaders.
Welch was busy with other personal concerns, including his ongoing five year victory lap as Illinois’ first Black Speaker, replete with ongoing lavish spending on multiple parties portrayed as fundraisers in Koehler, WI and Navy Pier and elsewhere.
Welch has spent $290,000 on limo rides in the past 48 months — $33,000 in the last quarter. He’s paid his top political aide $200,000 a year as Executive Director of Democrats for the Illinois House, and another $60,000 annually for “consulting,” far more than the governor or any other elected state official earns.
In early September, Welch flew to Philadelphia for a conference with other Black State House speakers. He posted a photo of himself on Facebook with other Black State House speakers at a posh restaurant, hosting an “Excellence in Bleu Speakeasy Dinner.”
Also in September, Welch attended the National Speaker’s Conference in South Carolina. He said he looked forward to serving as the next conference president and host in 2027, saying, “I can’t wait to welcome Speakers from across the country to the Land of Lincoln and show them why Chicago is second to none.”
But it won’t be Welch hosting anybody next fall. He’d forgotten that the position a mere 78 people had voted for him to hold was about more than politics and personal aggrandizement and the glitzy trappings and privileges of power.
None of it should have been a surprise. At the risk of blowing my own horn, in a 2021 interview with Bruce Rushton at Illinois Times, I warned about Welch.
“They’ve got to keep watching this guy,” I told Rushton. “Within two or three years, he’s going to start pulling some sh#t. That’s who he is.”
That doesn’t make me a brilliant political observer. Merely observant.
The Tribune’s Eric Zorn phrased it more politely than me in 2021 when he wrote, “I hope Speaker Welch proves more than equal to the daunting job ahead. But let’s not pretend that the clouds hanging over him have lifted just because most in his party seem to have ignored them.”
Hopefully Democrats are done pretending and ignoring and are finally prepared to elevate someone to the Speakership who is worthy of representing the collective values of the Illinois House of Representatives.
Democrats, media finally see through Chris Welch’s polite posturing
