Rush says Emanuel deserves 3rd chance for expanding ‘Second Chance’

Ten months ago, Rep. Bobby Rush joined Mayor Rahm Emanuel at a CTA bus garage to expand one of the congressman’s treasured programs: a “Second Chance” plan to provide job training and career opportunities for ex-offenders.

Rush gave Emanuel a pre-election boost on that day by accusing then-mayoral challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia of “cheapening” the legacy of Chicago’s first black mayor by attempting to resurrect the black-Hispanic coalition that elected Harold Washington.

On Tuesday, the scene was repeated with Rush joining forces with Emanuel at a time of political need.

A mayor under siege for his handling of the Laquan McDonald shooting video was essentially asking for a third chance from African-American voters who elected him in 2011 and re-elected Emanuel even after he closed a record 50 public schools.

Rush hinted strongly that Emanuel deserves that third chance. He quoted from the New Testament and Jeremiah’s letter to Jewish exiles in Babylon.

“Jeremiah wrote to them and said, `Thus say the Lord: Build homes in the midst of your pain. Build families in the midst of your pain. Grow gardens to feed yourselves in the midst of your pain.’ That’s an appropriate story for today,” Rush said.

“In the midst of all that we’re going through in this city, we’ve got to take time out to build lives, build homes, build communities, build a better city. So, I congratulate the leaders of this city, the mayor and also the City Colleges and CTA for focusing on building better families in the midst of this,” Rush said. “Because at the end of the day — when all of the headlines move on to something else — we still have people to employ, families to feed, lives to live.”

For weeks, Emanuel has been fending off demands for his resignation and fighting to restore public trust shattered by his decision to keep the Laquan McDonald shooting video under wraps for more than a year and wait until a week after the April 7 mayoral runoff to settle the case for $5 million before the McDonald family had even filed a lawsuit.

The video was released only after a judge ordered the city to do so. The mayor has emphatically denied keeping the dashcam video under wraps to get past the election.

But he has acknowledged that he “added to the suspicion and distrust” of everyday Chicagoans by blindly following and not questioning the city’s longstanding practice of withholding shooting videos to avoid compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.

On Tuesday, Rush argued that Emanuel is better positioned to effect the real reform in the Chicago Police Department certain to be demanded by a federal civil rights investigation than any successor would be.

“If the seat became vacant, it would take another five years to even get remotely to the point where we are right now in terms of the reforming of the Police Department,” Rush said.

“Whoever sits in there — as soon as they take their hand off the Bible, you know what their No. 1 priority would be? How do I get re-elected? They’re going to make the kind of compromises with the same old problems and purveyors of the problem that we’ve historically been faced with: the FOP, the same kinds of decisions with IPRA because their primary concern will be, ‘How do I turn this new opportunity into my re-election.’ So, let’s take that off the table,” he said.

Also joining Emanuel was U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., another champion of Second Chance programs for ex-offenders.

Davis, who endorsed Garcia for mayor, agreed that demands for Emanuel’s resignation are going nowhere.

“I don’t think we’re going to see any resignations. When people are in a position to be fired, they get fired. But when people are in positions where they get elected, if the electorate wants to change it, they’ve got to vote them out and vote somebody else in,” he said.

Under Emanuel, the CTA’s Second Chance program has quadrupled to include 265 jobs for bus and rail car servicers. According to City Hall, it’s one of the largest programs of its kind in the country with 600 participants since 2011.

The expansion announced Tuesday calls for the City Colleges’ Workforce Academy to provide skills development and career training for the program’s nonviolent ex-offenders.

The training will be tailor-made to meet the CTA’s needs. It will focus on customer services for the transportation industry, core skills such as math and problem-solving and technical skills needed to provide equipment safety.

“If you don’t want an ex-offender to become a repeat offender, find him a job,” Emanuel said.