Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), aggressively courting strong Democratic House candidates, is facing an awkward situation back home.

As chief of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, one of Emanuel’s tasks is recruiting. In the race for the open seat to replace retiring Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), Emanuel is not convinced the Illinois Democrat who is running for the seat, Christine Cegelis, can beat the state senator who is the probable GOP nominee, Peter Roskam.

Emanuel told me he has had several conversations with Army Maj. Ladda “Tammy” Duckworth, a helicopter pilot who lost her legs while serving in Iraq. Illinois’s mid-December filing deadlines for 2006 mean Emanuel only has a short time left to lock in an alternative.

“I have talked to her …” he said when I asked about Duckworth. “She expressed her interest. That’s where it is.”

Duckworth was injured when a grenade shot through the Plexiglas floor of her aircraft near Baghdad.

She’s no stranger to the House — she was a guest of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) at the State of the Union in the House chamber earlier in the year.

Cegelis, who ran against Hyde in 2004 and gained 44 percent of the vote in a shoestring campaign helped by Howard Dean’s Internet troops, has a network of supporters who have been e-mailing me that they are not keen on Emanuel’s recruiting drive in their Democratic back yard. Cegelis’s campaign manager, Patrick Mogge, told me she has no intention of backing down for Emanuel.

• ANWR checkmate. Are they playing checkers or chess?

House Republican leaders, struggling to pass a budget-reconciliation bill, amazingly put their own poison pill in the legislation last week — Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) provision. 

It was utterly predictable that the moderates would force a showdown over ANWR oil drilling. The ANWR advocates — from the White House, business community down to House and Senate committee chiefs — could be counted on to try again to use the revised spending package to win permission to drill for oil in Alaska.

ANWR, of course is one piece of the big puzzle of putting together the legislation, which includes Hurricane Katrina aid. Unlike other proposed cuts — such as Pell grants and Medicaid, ANWR is an issue that can make or break a deal. Very few lawmakers flip-flop on this one.

It’s a matter of counting. If there are more no’s than yeses on ANWR, why even put it in the bill? Injecting ANWR into the measure only triggered intramural warfare.

The 2006 general election is now less than a year away. And come January — only a few weeks from now — there is the growing possibility of new leadership elections. Why ask for trouble and risk the impression that the leadership — especially without former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) — does not exactly have its act together?

• Hastert at home. Tuesday was the first day senior citizens could sign up for the Medicare prescription-drug benefit — and face the headache of a jillion options.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) on Tuesday hosted a drug-benefit briefing in Aurora, Ill., in the heart of his district — with Medicare czar Mark McClellan.

Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it