The hits keep on coming for Chicago! A few days after collectively affirming its woke credentials by electing activist Brandon Johnson mayor, the Hog Butcher for the World has been awarded a prize pig indeed: the 2024 Democratic National Convention. As much as I invite the nation’s Democratic powerbrokers to assemble next year in the miserably hot and humid dog days of August and experience all that the Windy City has to offer in terms of exotic scents originating from the Chicago River, I caution them that if Mayor Johnson and the state legislature have their way, the Dems’ stay may be a little more costly and a little more dangerous than they anticipated.

As to the cost? Well, Chicago just elected an ultra-progressive mayor and a more progressive-leaning city council. One of Brandon Johnson’s signature revenue-raising plans to fund his spending agenda is raising the city’s sky-high hotel tax, penalizing tourism. As to the danger? I might remind you that Mayor-elect Johnson ran (and won) on a “Defund The Police”-lite platform. He won’t actually reduce their funding but won’t invest in recruiting or training, which I’m sure will benefit morale. But that problem exists in conjunction with one less well-known to those outside Illinois but equally as serious: In 2021, the Democratic legislature, in its infinite wisdom, passed the ironically named SAFE-T act, which includes the nation’s first-ever statewide “cashless bail” law. A pilot program that saw such stirring results in New York City in 2020 — for organized crime rings, that is — was hastily rushed into law by a legislature that spent one month patting itself on the back for its wokeness and the year after that hurriedly revising the legislation to make it slightly less toxic.

If it sounds like an incredibly stupid idea, that’s because it was; precisely the sort of thing that only could have passed in a spastic fit of left-wing activist-driven guilt in the wake of the Floyd riots (and also, to be fair, Chicago’s spotty history of police scandals). The sheriff’s departments of multiple downstate Illinois counties also agreed and immediately sued to keep it from going into law. The Illinois supreme court enjoined the SAFE-T Act and has heard oral arguments. Illinois awaits its ruling with bated breath, and if it is upheld — there is no solid constitutional argument for rejecting cashless bail by my reading; horrifically destructive laws are, alas, not necessarily unconstitutional ones — then Democratic conventioneers are in for an entirely new experience in either highly militarized downtown security or exciting street-crime adventure.

But that’s enough doomsaying for now. Perhaps the court will strike down the cashless bail law. Smart observers of Illinois politics suspect that legislators are quietly hoping the Supreme Court will spare them from either the consequences of their original vote or the flak that comes from having to go on the record to repeal it. My advice for all convention visitors next year is simple enough: Enjoy our beautiful city. Get a Chicago dog, and be sure to eat the sport pepper. Ignore so-called “Chicago-style deep-dish” pizza: It’s for tourists who want to fly back home 5 lbs heavier than they arrived. Take an architectural boat tour. Check out the Art Institute or Field Museum. Ask your greenhorn Uber driver to take you on a life-threatening adventure in Lower Wacker Drive.

But most especially, stay the hell out of my neighborhood. I don’t need the foot traffic.