SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Rod Blagojevich, the ex-governor and ex-convict who often dusted off old and sometimes puzzling quotes to emphasize his views, found himself on the other side Thursday when a federal judge dismissed his lawsuit in an effort to return to public life by Dr. To quote Seuss. : “Go.”
The Chicago Democrat, who was impeached and removed from office by the General Assembly in 2009 and subsequently sentenced to federal prison for political crimes, filed suit in federal court seeking to overturn a ban that involved came with his impeachment and that prohibits his return to public office.
On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven Seeger, in a colorful, 10-page smackdown, debunked Chicago’s action, the former governor’s claims point by point, and then relied on Dr. Seuss’s 1972, “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” to suggest what Blagojevich should do:
“The time has come. The time has come. Now is the time. Go. Go. GO! I don’t care how. You can go on foot. You can go by cow. Marvin K. Mooney, will you please now to go!’
Mark Vargas, a spokesman for Blagojevich, said the ruling was not a surprise.
“The people should be able to decide who will or will not represent them,” Vargas wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “not federal judges or establishment politicians who fear governors who fight for the people.”
He did not say whether Blagojevich, 67, would take further action.
As governor of Illinois from 2003 to 2009, Blagojevich was fond of quoting Greek philosophers, Roman statesmen and the Bible (particularly John 8:32: “The truth will set you free.”)
He was impeached and removed from office in 2009 and convicted in 2011 of 17 corruption charges, including attempting to sell or trade for political gain the U.S. Senate seat held by Barack Obama after his election as president released. He served eight years behind bars of a 14-year sentence before his sentence was commuted in 2020 by then-President Donald Trump. The Illinois Supreme Court also revoked his law license.
Blagojevich, who as governor routinely joked that he received a “C” in constitutional law at Pepperdine University Law School, filed the lawsuit in 2021, representing himself. Accompanied by a gaggle of reporters, cameras and microphones outside Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Building, the always immaculately coiffed Blagojevich declared, “I’m back.”
The federal civil rights complaint sought to overturn the Senate’s impeachment ban on his office, arguing that the ban violates the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the First Amendment’s protection of the people’s fundamental right to vote amendment. “And by that,” Seeger explained, “Blagojevich apparently means the fundamental right to vote for him.”
“The complaint is fraught with problems,” Seeger began. “If the problems were fish in a barrel, the complaint concerns an entire school of tuna. It is a goal-rich environment. The complaint is a wonderland for finding problems.”
First, Seeger said civil rights complaints should be filed against an individual, which is neither the state of Illinois nor its General Assembly.
Seeger then discussed at length why a federal court cannot intervene in an impeachment proceeding due to the separation of powers in the Constitution. The judge then pointed out that even if the impeachment ban were reversed, Illinois state law still prevents a convicted felon from “holding any office of honor, trust, or profit.”
The Sixth Amendment, Seeger wrote, applies to criminal trials, not civil ones: impeachment “took away his job, not his freedom,” he said.
Furthermore, Blagojevich cannot file a lawsuit to protect voters’ rights. They must speak for themselves, Seeger said, and “no voter here hopes to cast a vote for Blagojevich.”
Finally, the judge said that Blagojevich may not even have a reason to continue because when he filed the lawsuit, he said he might want to run again but that he hadn’t made a decision yet. Seeger noted that a legal claim is not “mature” if it depends on “contingent future events that may not occur.”
“The case started with a megaphone, but ends with a whimper,” Seeger concluded. “Sometimes cases in the federal courthouse attract publicity. But the courthouse is no place for a publicity stunt.
‘He wants to go back. But he’s already gone. Case dismissed.”