In an editorial of breathtaking absurdity, the New York Times blames the otherwise entirely blameworthy Jeff Sessions for police abuse in Chicago.

The wrenching shift in the Justice Department’s approach to criminal justice under President Trump is playing out painfully as Chicago tries to rein in a scandalous police culture that tolerated officers routinely abusing and killing residents, particularly African-Americans and Latinos.

The Attorney General of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, has sued Chicago for a consent decree, putting aside the meaning of the word “consent.”

“In the absence of a committed Justice Department, my office will seek the reforms and support police officers need to implement safe and constitutional police practices,” said Ms. Madigan, a Democrat, who spoke of a “broken trust” between black and Hispanic Chicagoans and their police force.

Did Sessions drop the ball by going limp on seeking a consent decree? Of course he did.

The need for overhauling the Chicago force was documented last January in a scathing report after a yearlong study by Justice investigators that detailed cases of abuse in “a culture in which officers expect to use force and not be questioned about the need for or propriety of that use.”

The Justice Department has reacted with simplistic echoes of the Trump campaign theme about “rampant” crime and the need for “proactive policing” in Chicago. Unfortunately, it did not point to the federal government’s obvious responsibility to help the city protect civil rights.

But none of this takes into account the fact that they have this guy named Rahm Emanuel who left his cushy job as Chief of Staff to President Obama and was elected Mayor of Chicago. It’s a city. Here in America. With its own government and its own mayor, and it can decide at any time to take control of its police department and, you know, run it. Contrary to the popular understanding of how cops work, they are under civilian political control.

if you don’t like how the cops are behaving, whether because they run roughshod over constitutional rights or kill people in the streets like dogs, do something about it. There’s a report prepared by the Department of Justice which told everybody what everybody already knew. The cops in Chicago are animals.

Many went bonkers when the report came out, as if this was some mystery solved. It made for really cool quotes for newspaper stories about misconduct and abuse, but said nothing that wasn’t already known. And the next step was a consent decree, because Rahm Emanuel needed a spanking from Washington or he would tell his cops to go out and rough up the bad guys some more.

But Rahm was on board. He wasn’t some crazy badgelicker backing his cops’ beating on minorities at will, like, say, Kamala Harris.

Mr. Emanuel stood beside Ms. Madigan on Tuesday as she announced the lawsuit that accused his police department of being “plagued” for decades by “unconstitutional conduct.”

So why doesn’t Rahm fix it? A piece of paper makes them feel more official? So why don’t Emanuel and Madigan write one up and sign off on it? They can fix the Chicago police any time they want. They can do it with a paper. They can do it without a paper.

In July, Ms. Madigan wisely dismissed as “ludicrous” the idea that any reform would be possible without the muscle of court enforcement. When she announced last week that the state had to act, the mayor was at her side, presumably back on the side of effective reform.

That link putatively providing the source for Madigan’s “wisely dismissed as ‘ludicrous'” comment reveals the lie. It goes to an old Times editorial relating back to Emanuel’s role in concealing the videotape of Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke murdering Laquan McDonald in the street. The old editorial ends with these words:

Writing in The Chicago Tribune, the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, called the agreement the city is now seeking “ludicrous” and declared, “There has never been systemic and comprehensive police reform in Chicago because there has never been an enforceable court order requiring it.” Mayor Emanuel should take those words to heart and act.

This has nothing to do with Sessions. This has nothing to do with a consent decree. And Madigan, not very wisely, is fundamentally wrong. The United States of America has a “consent decree,” and always has. It’s called the Constitution. Rewriting its duties in small enough words that they can be understood in Chicago doesn’t add anything to the duties it imposes.

What we do not have, perhaps never had, is a mayor who has the guts to make the cops, his cops, live up to their duty to behave constitutionally.

Consent decrees were always nonsensical palliatives for the ignorant masses, pieces of paper that told the cops to not violate the Constitution, in a few hundred thousand words. They would put into place a person who would write reports about how they were doing, which meant how he was fixing how they were doing, and it would go to a court which would order the cops to be more constitutional. Yeah, that fixes everything.

But Emanual is a Democrat. Madigan is a Democrat. Sessions is, well, old, crazy, completely out of touch and a Republican. It’s not as if the Mayor of Chicago should get off his butt and clean up the mess his cops keep leaving behind. It’s not as if the Illinois Attorney General has any official power to do much of anything other than point toward Main Justice. It’s like they’re totally powerless to run their own police without someone they hate to blame for their failings.

Does the federal government have a duty to protect constitutional rights? You bet it does, but it’s third in line, the stop-gap. The primary duty belongs to the guy who sits in the mayor’s chair, and the secondary duty belongs to the state AG. If Rahm Emanuel wants to fix his cops, then fix them. The consent decree has been in place since 1789.