Last week, on the occasion of being unanimously re-elected speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller delivered an address to the body in which he — however unintentionally — demonstrated the truth of that famous crack by former Parks Commissioner and ex-Council Member Henry Stern that the only difference between the council and a rubber stamp is that a stamp at least leaves an impression.

All but admitting the council’s cozy relationship with the city’s left-leaning establishment — Nypirg, Acorn, the trial lawyers, and the public sector unions — Mr. Miller said that he presided over a body “committed to progressive values, determined to advance a progressive agenda.”

In the two years since Mr. Miller was first elected speaker, he has yet to preside over a single closely contested vote. Last year, every incumbent up for re-election won easily, most all of them in September’s Democratic Party primary — when just 3.5% of registered voters cast their ballots.

Most voters in such off-year primaries are directly or indirectly employed by the city. In essence, union members and others dependent on municipal largesse elect their own bosses. Freed from the difficulties of contested council votes and difficult elections, Mr. Miller has dedicated most of his time to running for mayor.

Later in the same speech, Mr. Miller tried to fob himself off as a fiscal conservative with this unlikely boast: “Because we knew the importance of fiscal responsibility… we cut $2.5 billion in spending in fiscal 2003 and $3.5 billion out of the budget by fiscal 2004.” Spending, of course, has gone up — Mr. Miller invented these “cuts” by comparing pie-in-the-sky early spending proposals to what was eventually spent.

The council as we know it was created in 1989, when a new City Charter abolished the Board of Estimate and gave the council new or expanded powers over the municipal budget, zoning, land use, and franchises. Under Mayor Dinkins, it seemed the council, under the leadership of Peter Vallone Sr. — whose sense of the city as a whole and concern with maintaining a balance of power made him an ideal man for the job — had become almost the mayor’s equal, and succeeded in slowing and sometimes even stopping many of Mr. Dinkins’s worst ideas.

But after Rudolph Giuliani defeated Mr. Dinkins in 1993, it quickly became apparent that the council’s powers were far less than had been assumed. In 1995 and 1998, the council vetoed the mayor’s budget and passed its own, as was its right under the charter. But both times, Mayor Giuliani simply spent the budget he had proposed, refusing to spend the monies the council allocated. As Mr. Vallone put it last year, “We pass laws, but it’s up to the mayor to carry them out.”

Mayor Bloomberg has allowed the council to reassume the powers it held under Mr. Dinkins.

This time instead of Mr. Vallone — who chose the good of the city ahead of his political gain by fighting with Mr. Dinkins and partnering with Mr. Giuliani — the council is headed by Mr. Miller, whose most significant work to date has been working on a politically potent but functionally impotent lead paint law that would burden landowners and builders with the threat of frivolous litigation, while maintaining only a slim connection to the science on the subject. His other major “accomplishment” to date was working with his allies at the Campaign Finance Board and Nypirg to increase funding for his 2005 campaign. Under proposed rules changes that would directly benefit Mr. Miller, the match of public funds to money raised by a candidate would soar from an expensive 4-to-1 to an unconscionable 8-1.

The tragedy of the council is that it leaves the city with a legislative branch that provides little in the way of checks and balances to temper the mayor’s dictates and whims. To be sure, the council is, at times, effective on such local issues as constituent services and zoning changes. Its subpoena powers and public hearings have occasionally provided a welcome outlet for important civic issues, most recently Education Committee Chair Woman Eva Moskowitz’s electrifying hearings on the city contracts of school employees.

For the most part, though, the council has spent its time on symbolic gestures like hosting Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe and passing resolutions opposing the liberation of Iraq and such practical minutiae as dog leash laws and renaming streets; this while the city is trying to recover from the worst attack in its history. Its members’ preoccupations prove their irrelevance.

Now, it seems, we’re as likely to see Queens Democrat Allan Jennings unseated for sexual harassment as we are to see an incumbent lose a bid for re-election, though we’d be surprised if either were to occur. If Mr. Miller were truly interested in leading the council, and not merely running for mayor, he would challenge the body to become more relevant.