Rahm Emanuel’s troubles in trying to get on the ballot to run for Mayor of Chicago may not seem like a California issue, but it is a political law issue nonetheless, and one that lawyers and politicians in California scrap over every election cycle, and will surely be fighting over next year: residency requirements to qualify to run for office.
I won a full-blown trial early last year representing now State Senator Bill Emmerson in a case filed by supporters of opponent Russ Bogh, who wanted to kick Dr. Emmerson off the ballot in a special election for that State Senate seat, on grounds that he "didn’t live" in the district. Such claims were highly technical. Emmerson had spent practically all his life in and around the Inland Empire district he wanted to run in. He simply happened to represent an adjoining Assembly District at the same time. When the Judge worked through the evidence, he agreed with Emmerson, not Bogh’s supporters, and Dr. Emmerson went before the voters and was elected to fill the seat. Thus, the PEOPLE decided, not the lawyers.
There is absolutely no question that Rahm Emanuel is a Chicagoan. He represented the city in Congress, owns property there, is registered to vote there. But he left Congress to go work in the Obama Administration. Opponents have seized on Emanuel’s brief time away from Chicago during two years to essentially say he is no longer a Chicagoan and has lost his legal rights to run for office there.
Is that fair? Hell no.
I of course do not like any of Emanuel’s politics. But there is a pretty big principle at work here: does a political appointee that goes to work in Washington, D.C., or Sacramento, for that matter, lose their residency, and chance to run for office in their intended home area, by operation of law? They should not, because these jobs are political, the workers serve at the absolute pleasure of the President (or Governor, etc.) and are intended to be transitory. There is no permanent claim to these jobs, and it is a pretty cheap and unfair manipulation of the system to use such government service to disenfranchise anybody, whether it is Rahm Emanual or a conservative Republican.
Something a lot of people may not know is that when the initial challenge was brought to the Chicago Board of Elections against Emanuel’s residency, based largely on him "renting out" his Chicago house while working at The White House, the case file was assigned to a brilliant administrative judge/lawyer named Joe Morris, a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago. Joe himself, is a solid conservative. He is a long-time colleague of mine on the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union, which runs the national CPAC conference (to be held Feb 10-13 in D.C.). And he has also been a political appointee in another era: the Reagan Administration. In fact, Joe served as General Counsel to the U.S. Office of Personal Management (readers may know I filled a similar function as General Counsel of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission during roughly the same time period) and as a key aide at the Justice Department to Attorney General Ed Meese.
Conservative Joe Morris heard all the evidence against liberal Rahm Emanuel’s residency, or lack thereof, and wrote a very detailed 69 page decision that dismissed the arguments against Emanuel. The Chicago Board of Elections agreed with Morris and found in favor of Emanuel. Their decision was taken to a court, and the Judge also found in favor of Emanuel.
But opponents then took that case to an Illinois state appellate court which decided just a couple days ago by a vote of 2-1 that Morris, the Board of Elections, and the lower court Judge were all wrong, and Emanuel must be banned from the ballot, due for election February 22.
The latest turn in this Perry Mason-style saga has the Illinois Supreme Court just today issuing an extraordinary order forcing Emanuel back onto the ballot, pending a hearing.
Our democracy and how its representatives are selected should not turn on such legal technicalities. We should be able to tolerate more candidates on the ballot, not less, and arguments about whether a candidate is "really local" can be part of the lively election debate that voters are entitled to, not courtrooms. This is one of those cases where some liberals (like election lawyer Rick Hasen) and some conservatives (me) can really agree.
Next year, here in California we will be hearing a lot about residency of candidates as a result of a new reapportionment of 120 partisan legislative districts through a completely new process. Perhaps there will even be some more lawsuits, as in the Emmerson case. Will they be substantive cases, or just technical ones? We will see. Nevertheless, we simply can’t go wrong if we just let people on the ballot and just let the PEOPLE decide.