For the past few years, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago has been one of the most feared participants in the state's pension-reform debate.

Ty Fahner, a former Illinois attorney general who heads the Civic Committee, managed to convince both parties to elbow each other for a position of favor with him and his group.

When Fahner ended up siding with the House Democrats back in May and endorsing their pension-reform plan, including shifting costs to school districts, the House Republicans were furious and disappointed. They had been assiduously courting Fahner, and figured that since the Civic Committee is composed of several top Chicago business leaders, they'd be the natural ally of choice.

Not to mention that Fahner also formed a political action committee ("We Mean Business") to back up his word. Everybody wanted that money, so the PAC gave his position additional strength.

But those days appear to be behind us, at least for now. Fahner's histrionics last week over what he claimed was an "unfixable" pension problem have all but cut him out of the Statehouse mix. "He's made himself irrelevant," said one top Democratic official who is intimately involved with pension reform.