It was quite a scene at the City Council yesterday, as Speaker Gifford Miller imposed penalties on the three Democratic members of the Council who did not fall in line on the 18.5% property tax increase enacted last year. The three members — James Davis, Allan Jennings, and Anthony Avella — were denounced by Mr. Miller and others for their intransigence and will lose committee memberships. This led one of the three, Mr. Jennings, to compare himself with Jesus and led Mr. Davis to make allusion to a Democratic mafia out for revenge.

While one needn’t endorse the particular metaphors used by the renegade members to illustrate their plight, Messrs. Davis, Jennings, and Avella certainly set a fine example with their votes against the property tax increase. Mr. Miller’s retribution is a telling sign: The members had to be punished because they left other members hanging out to dry. Could this be because the tax hike was massively unpopular?

“Each of you is only empowered if the institution is empowered,” Mr. Miller told the Council, as reported by our Benj. Smith. But this is a strange statement. How exactly did caving in to Mayor Bloomberg’s tax proposal empower the institution? Though Mr. Miller believes it is important to maintain discipline in his party so as to take on the mayor, it remains that the City Council is effectively a one party government. The tax hike only happened through the complicity, not the bellicosity, of the Council with regard to the mayor’s wishes.

We are reminded of the scene in Gracie Mansion last month, when Mr. Bloomberg promised to support — in any way he could — council members, including Democrats, who supported his tax bill. Angry Republicans walked out of the dinner outraged; the implication was that they, too, will be punished by their party leader for not falling into line. It seems that, Democrat or Republican, the powers that be at City Hall are intent on rewarding and punishing the identical set of lawmakers. There is a whiff of cosa nostra to all of this, even if it is not exactly polite to call it that.

In any event, the thing to do would be for the Democratic members who have just been chastised for their opposition to the property tax increase to go have dinner with the Republicans who walked out of the dinner at Gracie Mansion in disgust at the mayor’s vow to fight against nominees of his own party. They could talk about deeper principles than party, how the kinds of tax increases that have been rammed through hurt constituencies of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Maybe something good could come out of this moment of political payback.