The case now before the Illinois Supreme Court is called United Citizens of Chicago and Illinois v. Coalition to Let the People Decide in 1989, but it really should be called Sawyer v. Evans, round three.
The prime statutory culprit is the mayoral vacancy law in the Illinois Municipal Code. It provides that “if a vacancy occurs in the office of the mayor of a city with a four-year term, and there remains an unexpired portion of the term of at least 28 months, and the vacancy occurs at least 130 days before the general municipal election next scheduled under the general election law, the vacancy shall be filled at that general municipal election.”
The coalition, joined by 2nd Ward Alderman Bobby Rush, 24th Ward Committeeman Jesse Miller, and west-side activist Nancy Jefferson–Evans allies all–thereupon sued the Board of Elections in Cook County Circuit Court. Evans owns up to having helped raise money to fund the lawsuit.
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Hurst blames Dvorak and Totten for allowing a slate of “Democratic rejects” to run as Republicans in last week’s county elections, and he blames Vrdolyak for being one of them. In his view their transparent posing accounts for the county Republicans’ “crashing defeat.”
To the surprise of some observers, Hurst appealed his loss on an expedited basis to the state supreme court, whose decision we await. His prospects, however, appeared dim in view of the foregoing, especially in light of the argument that public policy ought to favor allowing Chicagoans to elect their mayor directly without having to abide the indirect vote of the City Council for another three years.
Majestic as may be our electoral statutes, this new coalition was plainly inspired by something more. While Mayor Mum continued his effort to stay at a deniable distance, his fingerprints on the 1991 coalition were not hard to discern. There on its roster appeared the names of such surrogates as the Reverend Al Sampson and Dorothea Washington, who was recently dispatched by Sawyer to serve as CHA security chief. And the 1991 coalition was represented by the law firm of Jones, Ware & Grenard, which has done a lot of business with the city under the auspices of our acting mayor.
