Rahm Emanuel's Missing The Right Chicago Friends

After all that fanfare, good wishes from his best buddy, the United States President Barack Hussein Obama and oodles of campaign donations, Rahm Emanuel failed the crucial qualifying test to run for the Chicago mayoralty.  According to the court there, he hasn't been living in Chicago.

As anyone who reads the news from the states knows, Emanuel has spent the last year working for and with the US President.  Being a family man, he took his family with him to Washington DC, and they rented out their house.

Legal experts have offered widely diverging views of what the state’s municipal code means when it refers to legal residency.

Supporters of Mr. Emanuel, who was born in Chicago and represented a Congressional district here for years, say legal residency is a matter of “intent” and whether he always intended to return from Washington after the White House — a circumstance they argue is backed up by his owning a house here (though a tenant has rented it for now), voting here, paying taxes here, and leaving his most prized possessions (including his wife’s wedding dress) here.

Others — including two of the Illinois appellate justices issuing the ruling on Monday — say that physical presence is needed, and that service at the White House provides no special exception.

Some here were hinting that they sensed old-school Chicago politics in the ruling, particularly in a state where judges are elected and local party leaders sometimes support them, but others dismissed such notions.

The appellate court justices who held the majority in the case — Thomas E. Hoffman and Shelvin Louise Marie Hall — have run as Democrats, court officials said, and Mr. Hoffman, who wrote the ruling and has served 17 years as an appellate judge, was widely lauded by colleagues for his past legal analyses.

So, what's Mr. Emanuel going to do now, besides appeal?

I find this ironic, so similar but with different results to the controversy surrounding Obama's birthplace.  Americans are divided as to whether he was born in Africa or Hawaii.  The Republicans didn't fight this to the end, because McCain's birthplace is only "technically" the United States of America.  He was born in the Panama Canal Zone.

McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

It would have been a real slap in the face to the United States military personnel not to accept a son or daughter of a high-ranking Navy officer, like McCain as "kosher" to be U.S. President.

Decades ago, as a student in Great Neck North, I remember a Social Studies teacher telling us what United States Law is:

"It's whatever five out of nine Supreme Court Judges say it is."

In a sense it's random luck, depending on which judges are making (voting on) the decision.  So far, it seems like "lady luck" isn't with Rahm Emanuel.