Obama’s friend and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, perhaps, should not begin popping champagne just yet.
The Illinois Supreme Court has agreed to hear his claim that he should be allowed to be a candidate for mayor in Chicago.
But Burt Odelson, the lead attorney pressing the eligibility case against Emanuel, predicted to WND last November that the case would go all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court and that Emanuel would lose on the appeal.
So far, everything in the case has gone just as Odelson predicted.
The suspense is not likely to last long because the Illinois Supreme Court is expected to decide quickly, possibly before the end of the week.
It was a ruling of the state’s highest court today that revealed it will consider Emanuel’s arguments on an expedited basis.
If the Illinois Supreme Court affirms the Illinois Appellate Court ruling, Emanuel will lose the case and his name will be taken off the ballot, with no higher courts in the state left to reverse the decision.
That the state’s Supreme Court refused to allow any new briefs to be filed and ruled out oral arguments are clear signals it intends to decide the case quickly.
In a move that is somewhat confusing to those not familiar with legal procedures, the Illinois Supreme Court also issued today an emergency order directing that if any ballots are printed before the decision is rendered, Rahm Emanuel’s name should appear as a candidate for mayor.
The Chicago Board of Election Commissions is printing the ballots immediately since early voting for the Feb. 22 elections starts on Monday, and the decision means that Emanuel’s name, if he ultimately is confirmed as a candidate, would appear.
The Illinois Supreme Court apparently thought it more fair to put the Chicago Board of Election Commissions through the extra effort of reprinting the ballots without Emanuel’s name if he loses his appeal than to harm Emanuel by keeping his name off the ballot in early voting should it turn out the Illinois Supreme Court rules in his favor.
Odelson, who argued that Emanuel is a resident of Washington, D.C., and as such does not meet the statutory requirements to be a resident of Chicago to run for mayor, continues to be the lead lawyer fighting Emanuel.
Interestingly, the court case has gone exactly as Odelson predicted to WND that the case would go.
Odelson predicted Emanuel would win at the level of the Chicago Board of Election Commissions.
On Nov. 19, 2010, WND reported Odelson predicted he would ultimately be able to keep Emanuel off the ballot by winning the case at the appellate level.
“If I didn’t think I was going to win, I wouldn’t file the challenge,” Odelson told WND last November, correctly predicting he would lose the challenge with the Board of Election Commissioners for the City of Chicago, only to be vindicated by Illinois higher courts.
“Elections law clearly specifies that a candidate for mayor in Chicago must have been a resident of Illinois for at least a year before running for election,” Odelson said. “Emanuel is a resident of Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife and family, not Chicago.
On Monday, Odelson won at the level of the Illinois Appellate Court, just as he predicted.
“We conclude that the candidate [Rahm Emanuel] neither meets the municipal code’s requirements that he have ‘resided’ in Chicago for the year preceding the election in which he seeks to participate nor falls within any exception to the requirement,” the Illinois Appellate Court wrote in its opinion.
And, also just as Odelson forecast, today the Illinois Supreme Court agreed to review the decision of the Illinois Appellate Court.
Emanuel has been leading Chicago mayoral candidate polls, leading to speculation that he would win the Feb. 22 election with a majority, thereby avoiding an April run-off election.
Emanuel has so far raised $10.6 million in the first three months of his mayoral bid, a sum that is expected to be almost three times the total donated to all his opponents in the Feb. 22 election.
Mayoral challenger Gery Chico, a former chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley and a long-time Chicago Democratic politics insider, had raised $1 million as of Dec. 31, according to reports filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections, while former Illinois State Senator Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat, has about $125,000 on hand, as reported by the Associated Press.
On Dec. 23, 2010, the Chicago Board of Elections voted 3-0 that Emanuel was eligible to be a mayoral candidate.
The decision of the Chicago Board of Elections confirmed a ruling from Joseph Morris, a local Chicago attorney and elections official who conducted a three-day hearing in December 2010, ruling that Emanuel should be allowed to appear on the ballot.
“The preponderance of this evidence establishes that the candidate never formed an intention to terminate his residence in Chicago; never formed an intention to establish his residence in Washington, D.C., or any other place than Chicago; and never formed an intention to change residence,” Morris told CNN last December.
WND has previously reported on Oct. 5, 2010, that Odelson argued President Obama is oddly more qualified to run for mayor in Chicago than is Emanuel.
“President Obama has a residence in Chicago,” he pointed out. “Obama has not rented out his Chicago residence and he visits it regularly.”
“This is a fact-sensitive determination,” he stressed, “and as far as I know, Emanuel has rented his residence in Illinois since September 2009. He may be a property owner, but he is not a resident within the applicable definition of the Illinois code.”
Odelson stressed that a person may own one or more home, but for legal purposes, a person can only have one official domicile under the law.
“Rahm Emanuel lives in the District of Columbia, not Chicago,” he said. “The legal question of his eligibility to run for mayor of Chicago is as simple as that. Rahm Emanuel is not eligible.”
He argued the case would be an easy one for the Board of Election Commissioners for the city of Chicago to decide, largely because Emanuel has not attempted the usual dodges to the one-year residency requirement.
“He hasn’t rented a place in Chicago that he can claim is his residence,” Odelson noted. “He isn’t attempting to say he’s living in his mother’s basement or with friends in Chicago. This is not a hard case for me to win.”
Odelson speculated Emanuel might try to qualify under a provision in the Illinois code that was passed in 1943 to prevent Illinois residents who were in military service during World War II from losing their status as Illinois residents while they were stationed overseas.
“Emanuel was not in Washington as a member of the military,” Odelson objected. “He leased his house on Chicago’s North Side and he moved his family to Washington.”
Even if Emanuel used an absentee ballot to vote in an Illinois election like the primary, the legitimacy of his vote could be called into question and that vote alone, even if somehow he was permitted to cast it, would not establish his residency to run for mayor, Odelson said.
Odelson, who has been practicing municipal and elections law for 38 years, cited Illinois state law regarding the qualifications for elective office, 65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-5(a), that clearly states, “A person is not eligible for an elective municipal office unless that person is a qualified elector of the municipality and has resided in the municipality at least one year next preceding the election or appointment.”
Although Odelson represents both Democrats and Republicans in Illinois politics, he was selected by then-Gov. George W. Bush’s presidential election campaign to represent the Republican side in the Florida voter recount during the 2000 presidential election.
Odelson was qualified for this assignment by the role he played in 1990 case Pullen v. Mulligan, 561 N.E.2d 585 (1990), a case that first defined the term “chad” as signifying the paper residue that can result from an incompletely punched voter form
The term for the newly elected mayor in Chicago starts May 16, 2011.
Incumbent Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Democrat, has been in office since 1989; he is not running for re-election.
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