-By Dan Proft
First Keith Olbermann was taken off the air and now Rahm Emanuel has been taken off the ballot. It has been like an infusion of vegetables into the diet of a body politic suffering from left-wing induced acidosis.
In the Rahm case, it is up to the seven members of the Illinois State Supreme Court to maintain our newfound homeostasis.
The state’s high court should end Rahm’s fraudulent candidacy.
Forget all of the editorial bluster from jailhouse lawyers in the media and the legalese from the actual lawyers. As soon as Rahm rented out his home he removed his intent to reside there.
He failed to re-establish residency (“intent to reside”) at another Chicago address for a year prior to the date of election. Therefore, Rahm does not meet the residency requirement to run for mayor.
The legal issue at bar is positively insipid compared to the politics at play.
Much has been said about Justice Anne Burke, wife of Chicago Ald. Ed Burke. If Rahm is elected, Ed Burke gets put out to pasture. The Burke family has millions of dollars worth of motivation to stop Rahm.
Burke is not the only one, however. Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s belief is that this state has room for only one Latin American-style strongman and he is it.
A motivated Madigan could move numbers on the court: Madigan just spent millions of dollars to get Chief Justice Thomas Kilbride retained; Justice Charles Freeman has also been the beneficiary of campaign cash from Madigan and his trial lawyer buddies over the last twenty years; and, recently appointed Justice Mary Jane Theis whose term is up in 2012 probably hopes she will be similarly supported for her retention vote.
The tiny dancer knows all of this too. His nervous smiling while he pirouetted before the Chicago media yesterday was the telltale sign.
The Supreme Court’s vote may not be as close as some think. I am not here advocating that politics play a role in the decision but I am not so naïve as to think that Lady Justice is blind, particularly in Illinois.
If a political fixer like Rahm is ultimately done in by the fix, at least poetic justice will have been served.
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Dan Proft (dan@danproft.com) is a talk show host and political commentator for WLS-AM 890 (wlsam.com) in Chicago and a Senior Fellow at the Illinois Policy Institute (http://illinoispolicy.org/).
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