RAHM EMANUEL MEETS THE ONE YEAR RESIDENCY RULE, HE IS BONA FIDE!

Icheoku says the politics of the proverbial windy city never ceases to amaze its numerous fans and watchers. The latest being the attempt by Illinois Appellate court to suggest that the erstwhile chief of staff to President Barack Obama is not a 'sufficient' Chicago resident and does not meet the one year residential requirement for any prospective mayoral candidate of the city of Chicago; hence is not qualified and cannot run for the office.

Icheoku says never in the history of global legalism has an opinion been so weird; reached without adjudicating the intent of such a person as to his residential allegiance. This is a man who answered a national call by the president of the country to serve the government and the country as the chief of staff of the president. In accordance with the dictates of the office he moved on the national assignment to Washington DC from his primary place of residence, Chicago. Icheoku says only a demented human will interpret this temporary relocation to Washington DC to be an abandonment of  the primary Chicago residence. We are also convinced that were the two cities easily commutable, Rahm Emanuel would rather have commuted than uproot and dislocate his wife and children from their place of work and school as well as from family, friends and relatives including a familiar neighborhood.

The people of Chicago would have, instead of this pettiness of trying to bar Mr. Emanuel from the Chicago mayoral race through the back-door, ushered him with fanfare into the mayor's office for meritoriously representing Chicago in Washington, helping another Chicagoan, the president. But politics always gets in the way and humans start taking inexplicable positions which no rational mind can fathom or explain. The only explanation that could possibly try unraveling the appellate court's position is that its membership is constituted by anti-Emanuel judicial activists who are so petty and jealous of his success in getting all the pies that their chagrin turned to irrationality? The matter was even made worse by the fact that two of the opinionated members are registered democrats and you wonder where cometh the beef? Good enough, his appeal of the matter to the states Supreme Court is in good hands and the wise men and women of the higher court will see through the phoniness of the appellate decision.

The controlling and dispositive legal guiding principle in cases like Rahm Emanuel's, is to determine the intent of the party - whether he  want to permanently divorce himself from his primary residence or still regards it as home and plans to return thereto at the end of his call for service. Icheoku says Rahm Emanuel is the later and his case is akin to our servicemen and women who go on call of duty tours in Afghanistan and Iraq or even NASA astronauts who are at the Space station hovering over two hundred miles above the earth. So will it not be ridiculous to suggest or in anyway infer that these people have lost their primary residence in the country just because duty-called and they answered, 'here I am send me?' Icheoku agrees with Emanuel erudite lawyers that he never lost his residency by answering the call of the president to serve the country as his chief of staff. Therefore let Rahm Emanuel run for the mayoral seat as he will definitely win and is the only candidate among the contestants with a feet big enough to fill the vacating Mayor Richard M. Daley colossal shoes. Other contestants Miguel del Valle, Carol Moseley Braun, Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins, Gery Chico and William Walls do not possess the gravitas of Rahm Emanuel and are no match or good enough for Chicago. Chicago does not deserve any less a mayor than a man who has been a White House aide, a Congressman and a Chief of Staff!