Within minutes of the high court ruling, Emanuel was back shaking hands with voters, taking a congratulatory call from his old boss, President Barack Obama, and working to recapture an aura of invincibility he had worked hard to project until an appellate court ruling threatened to boot him from the Feb. 22 contest.
The debate over whether Emanuel was qualified to run began the moment he resigned his Washington post and returned to Chicago in September, only to find the tenant in his Lakeview house was unwilling to let him move back in. It ended in a flurry of legal activity this week that rendered the episode all but meaningless.
But the months-long legal fight did serve to lavish free publicity on a candidacy that needed no extra help, given Emanuel's huge lead in fundraising and his two-to-one edge over the next closest rival in a recent Tribune/WGN-TV poll.
"The voters deserved the right to make the choice of who should be mayor. And I think what the Supreme Court said was basically, in short, that the voters will make the decision who should be mayor," a victorious Emanuel said after slapping backs and shaking hands with commuters at the Clark and Lake elevated train stop near his downtown headquarters.
The abrupt end to the legal challenge came two hours before the first live televised debate between Emanuel and the three other major candidates vying to replace retiring Mayor Richard Daley: City Clerk Miguel del Valle, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun and Gery Chico, a former top Daley aide and Chicago school chief. Indeed, the residency controversy was the first question that came up at the debate, sponsored by the Tribune and The City Club.
Chico, for one, appeared to nod to that reality after Thursday's ruling. "Emanuel's residency drama has made this election into a circus instead of a serious debate about the future of Chicago," Chico said in a statement. "With less than 30 days to go until Election Day, there is no time to waste. Game on."
The residency challenge was spearheaded by Chicago attorney Burt Odelson, who declined comment following the ruling. Odelson's case centered around the decision by Emanuel, a North Side congressman until late 2008, to rent his home when he left for Washington to serve as a top aide to President Barack Obama.
City law says mayoral candidates must reside in Chicago for at least one year prior to the election and Emanuel didn't return until September.
That, argued Odelson, was proof that Emanuel did not meet the residency rule and should not be allowed on the ballot. The Chicago Board of Elections disagreed, as did a Cook County Circuit judge after Odelson filed a legal challenge to the board's decision.
Last week, however, a panel of the Illinois Appeals Court ruled 2-1 that Emanuel did not meet the residency standard and was ineligible to run. That was reversed unanimously by the Supreme Court, though two of the seven justices—Anne Burke and Charles Freeman—wrote a separate opinion expressing some sympathy for the Appellate Court on which they once served.
The high court took a clear swipe at the appellate court's reasoning on the residency question, and most of the justices signaled their displeasure at being called upon to render an emergency decision in a case that they felt turned on legal precedent decided more than 140 years ago.
"The novel standard adopted by the appellate court majority is without any foundation in Illinois law," read the majority opinion signed by five justices.
The justices found that Emanuel never displayed an intent to permanently abandon his Chicago home, which they said would have been the trigger to render him ineligible. Instead, they said, it was clear that when he went to Washington he always planned the move to be temporary and to one day return to Chicago.
The court said the appellate panel hung its decision on a misinterpretation of an 1867 Illinois Supreme Court case involving a judge who temporarily moved to Tennessee but always planned to come back. In essence, the appellate court concluded the 19th Century decision didn't cover Emanuel and that residency should be defined as where one rests his head at night.
The court said the appellate panel seemed to suggest that the Supreme Court in 1867 "did not know what it was talking about."
Agreeing with points made by Emanuel's lawyers, the justices noted the appellate court's rationale would mean congressmen serving in Washington or legislators spending time in Springfield would be ineligible to run for local offices back home.
Even someone with a vacation home in Florida might be ineligible to seek Chicago office if they didn't sleep in the city every night for a year before an election. "Would a week at the second home be short enough but two months be too long?" the court asked.
Though agreeing that Emanuel should be on the ballot, Burke and Freeman in a separate opinion slammed their fellow justices for taking such a harsh tone about appellate judges Shelvin Louise Marie Hall and Thomas Hoffman.
"Spirited debate plays an essential role in legal discourse. But the majority … cross the line," wrote Freeman and Burke. "There is no reason for the majority here to cast aspersions on the Appellate Court's motivations."
Veteran Illinois elections lawyer Andrew Raucci said the language used by the high court majority was indeed unusually strong, but he thought the opinion was well-reasoned.
"I don't know that I agree with the majority's opinion that the law has been settled for 150 years," Raucci said. "I believe reasonable people could have differed on that prior to this decision, but they've clarified it now."
The high court ruling may not totally put to rest the public debate over Emanuel's residency, but it did bring needed clarity to the elections board, which was facing a potentially expensive bureaucratic nightmare.
With the start of absentee and early voting fast approaching, the board ordered printing to begin on ballots that did not include Emanuel's name after Monday's Appellate Court decision.
The next day, the Supreme Court ordered a halt to that printing process, but not before 300,000 Emanuel-less ballots were printed up, creating a potentially instant collector's item. Then the board went ahead printing ballots that included Emanuel's name, and that now appears to have been the correct bet.
"The printing has moved ahead steadily, working all three shifts since Tuesday," said board Chairman Langdon D. Neal. "We are well into the process with more than 1 million ballots printed. It's good to have certainty."
Politics always has turmoil doesn't it?
ReplyDelete