The prospect of President-elect Joe Biden tapping former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for a top-shelf administration position is stirring strong opposition among far-left Democrats.
Emanuel has reportedly been lobbying for a nomination for transportation secretary. That prospect is now off the table with Biden’s announcement Wednesday that the transportation post would instead go to former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic rival of the president-elect and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
But Emanuel’s name remains in circulation for other Biden administration posts such as an ambassadorship. And that’s dredging up grievances from the Left that go back years and even decades.
Concerns linger about Emanuel’s tenure as a senior aide to President Bill Clinton, working on what became the 1994 crime law with Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The law today is detested on the Left, blamed for mass incarceration and a range of other social problems.
After a short but lucrative stint in the private sector, Emanuel in 2002 won a Chicago-area House seat. In 2008, then-President-elect Barack Obama tapped Emanuel as chief of staff, a job he held for nearly two years before winning the Chicago mayoralty.
And it’s Emanuel’s actions in that role that have liberals concerned. Specifically, the city of Chicago’s handling of the 2014 murder of black teenager Laquan McDonald by a police officer and a subsequent cover-up.
“The thing about covering up the murder of Laquan McDonald is that it disqualifies you from holding any type of public office. Forever,” incoming Rep. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat, said in a tweet last week.
Emanuel’s failures on the McDonald case are but one indictment in the eyes of liberals, however.
In an interview with the New York Times last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, said Emanuel’s mayoral term illustrates why he, or someone like him, “would be a pretty divisive pick.”
When 26,000 Chicago Teachers Union members went on strike in 2012, Emanuel ended the labor dispute by filing suit.
One year later, Emanuel stoked further ire when his Board of Education voted to close 49 schools, many on Chicago’s high-poverty south and west sides, transferring “thousands” of students to schools elsewhere.
His closure of six of the city’s 12 mental health clinics in 2012 earned him further scorn from many on the Left.
Of his potential appointment to the Biden administration, said AOC, “It would signal, I think, a hostile approach to the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party.”
Other critics have said that “he shouldn’t be anywhere near the White House,” charging that his hostility and attacks on unions should ax him from contention.
“We don’t want him [in Chicago], but we don’t want him anywhere near the White House, either,” Chicago Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez said in a tweet.
The former two-term Chicago mayor is now a senior adviser for Wall Street investment firm Centerview Partners, according to a biography on the firm’s website.
As for a Biden administration ambassadorship, it’s not the first time Emanuel has been mentioned. During the 2016 campaign, Emanuel, who is Jewish, was floated as a potential pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel if Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the White House. Emanuel denied the prospect at the time, calling the notion “ridiculous.”
The Biden-Harris transition did not respond to a request for comment.