There is no appointment to the House, but Chicago might try it to test the Constitution. People in Chicago are most needy.
There is no need to appoint a new Congressman when you get to decide who the Dem nominee will be. The nominee will be selected by the Dem ward committeemen within the district (and by Dem county supervisors from the areas outside Cook County, I guess), which means that Obama, Rahm, Quinn, etc. will get to strong-arm Dem pols to nominate the candidate of their choice.
When Blago expressed interest in selling the IL-05 House seat to the highest bidder after Rahm vacated it to become Obama’s Chief of Staff, a lot of people thought “Blago is so stupid that he thinks the governor gets to appoint House members like they were Senators.” But Blago was no dummy—he wanted to sell his influence in picking the Dem nominee in an overwhelmingly Dem district.
That would be fun. I'm arguing with the "abolish the 17th amendment!!!" crowd on another thread. It would be interesting to see Illinois government officials attempt to appoint Sandi Jackson or something (or any really blatantly crooked RAT who wouldn't make it thru a RAT primary), just so the state legislature apologists here can see just how crooked state legislatures are.
Aside from their whole "everything the founders ever thought of is INFALLIBLE!!" argument (which they contradict by admitting they wouldn't want other post-1789 amendments abolished), they actually seem to believe that state politicians would choose better Senators than citizens. Why not have state politicians pick House members too? Wouldn't they want those wise, statesmanlike politicians picking out superior candidates for BOTH Houses? Why does the anti-17th amendment crowd want our "local" Congressmen to be inferior to those great Senators selected for us?
It reminds me of the "I'm against the death penalty because it's the easy way out and life in prison is a worse punishment -- but I'd allow the death penalty for terrorists" argument. So they want to give terrorists a "lesser" punishment?