Here is the final piece of the puzzle. Sometime soon (very soon, perhaps within 2 weeks) Balgojevich is either removed from office or resigns. The new Governor, Pat Quinn says I have reviewed the appointment and I feel Roland Burris is the appropriate man to occupy the seat until a special election in 2010.

And they all lived happily ever after!

Cue the knucklehead chorus (yeah, you, Shortstop) to explain why this farce was really brilliant politics.

Reid's handling of this has not been 'clumsy'! It has been consistent with all of his time as the senate majority leader. He has consistently 'caved' on everything.

I only hope that Reid will not decide to grow a spine when we have a democrat as president! He definitely has not had one regarding standing up to the Bush Criminal Enterprise!

While we may not like the smell of the Illinois/Burris situation, I can not perceive of any legal grounds to deny the seat to Burris. After eight years of the disregard of the Constitution and the Bush administration's destruction of the idea of obeying laws, I am ready for a return to following the Constitution and the laws!

ditto: SadOldVet

Reid needs to go!

The pols in DC have it in their mind that they have to get ahead of the curve on potentially dicey issues that can sour the public and become "crises." This goes back to Clinton's term, when 24 hour news cycles were just getting underway. Now we see that this can lead to clumsy, rushed, ill-conceived behavior by our leaders.
Tak a breath, guys. Give yourselves a little wriggle room by citing the one indisputable defense in handling these tough issues: "We are investigating our options. We are looking at the law and precedent that governs this, and we will inform you of our posture at the appropriate time."

Besides Blago, the real blame for this lies with the Illinois Legislature. They were so busy playing games with who-is-going-to-succeed-who that they neglected to pass a law stripping Blago of his right to appoint a new senator or a law calling for a special election. Either of those could have been done several ways, and quickly.

Not to mention that impeachment should have happened quickly. Blago has been ineffective as a governor for at least two years.

"I think it's fair to say Reid's handling of this has been, for lack of a better word, clumsy."

I would go pathetic. Remember the good old days when we would talk about the popcorn and sitting back to watch republicans... Well guess who has been eating popcorn for the last month.

One thing I love about republicans is they have people who actually know the rule book inside out. We on the other hand run on... what does Reid run on ? It's not organized nor is it effective and it always makes him (us) look weak and unprepared.

How is this fool going to get the stimulus package through w/o giving republicans everything they want and Americans little. Reid is the gatekeeper to another depression and that scares the living hell out of me.

New Rule! After posting multiple comments on the same blog for an entire week, you have to come up with a screen name! "Anonymous" is reserved for one-time posters, unprotected whistle blowers and homosexual Republicans!

dittoditto SOV and Mark. I wish Reid et al could have admitted the legality of Burris' seating sooner and just effing said, out loud, "But we don't have to fucking like it." Because, I'm guessing, that's what most of those involved are thinking. All this "hm, well, a couple more hoops to jump through, just to be sure" -- it looks wishy-washy, like caving. But there IS no caving here, nothing to cave TO--this is just the way things are. The grudging harumphing around just ramps up the perception (however legitimate) of spinelessness.

Reid and Durbin have just given legitimacy to our corrupt governor. So much for standing on principles and your word.

And they have just handed the Republicans the next elected Senate seat in IL in 2010.

But, in the big economic picture, I don't think many of us are going to be in a position to care about this in two years.

The smart move for Senate Democrats would be to seat Burris and UNseat Reid as an incompetent, unqualified holder of the post of majority leader. Reid is NOT, in any way, a leader.

Yet further proof (as if we needed more) that Harry Reid needs to be replaced as Majority Leader.

The new Senate is not even in session and he has already turned into a joke of a session.

Between this and backing off on his pledge to have the stimulus bill ready by the 20th he's breaking promises at a record pace.

Here's to two more years of capatulation and incompotence

Perhaps the "hard line" on corruption should have started two months ago or so, and Senate Dems should have resisted the urge to give the felon Ted Stevens a standing-f******-ovation. And maybe Reid could have bit his lip today instead of telling some guy from Politico that Stevens shouldn't get jail time 'cuz he's suffered enough and he's a war hero.

Reid and Senate Dems take a hard line on corruption. There's obviously nothing wrong with that

IF only they had taken those 'principled' stands sometime during the last 2 years against the Bush administration, I'd agree with that statement.

Harry Reid is an odd little fellow his self. I wish him well, but sometimes he really doesn't inspire confidence.

I might have been more sympathetic to "Bill Mar's" point -- which is a good one -- if he hadn't felt it necessary to use 'homosexual' as a pejorative. Please take your bigotry elsewhere.

And I'm sure all of these Monday-morning quaterbacks would have handled it so-o-o much better. I mean, c'mon. This is basically a lose-lose situation and pretty unpecedented at that. The real problem is that an idiot like Blago managed to get himself elected governor in the first place (and re-elected), but that's reality, baby. Save your dumping on Reid for when it really matters.

It's time to stop calling Reid and others, but especially Reid, the *leadership*. There is no leadership on the Democratic side of the Senate aisle.

Lou said "Reid and Durbin have just given legitimacy to our corrupt governor. So much for standing on principles and your word."

While I can sympathize with your feelings about Blago, the simple truth is that he has not had his day in court and therefor is the legitamate sitting governor. Until such time as he is convicted in a court of law and forced out of office--or removed from office by impeachment hearings--he is the governor and has the power to appoint a replacement senator.

There appears to be no indication that any wrongdoing occured with THIS appointment. The fact that we don't like Blago is irrelavent. The appointment is legal.

There are things Harry Reid can control and things that he can't control. Appointing senators is a governor's perogative and is out of the control of the senate majority leader. Allowing a senator to be a part of the caucus and participate in committees is largely under the control of Reid.

The better position would have been to announce that an incoming senator appointed by Blogojevich would not be recognized by the Democratic caucus and the candidate would not be given any committee assignments. Then Reid would not have to back down in such a humiliating manner.

"...Reid is trying to take the responsibility out of his hands (and that of his caucus), and push this onto officials in Illinois"

The problem isn't with pushing the responsibility onto Illinois officials, and in particular the Illinois state legislature, where it clearly belongs (read the constitution). It is that Reid ever suggested that he could do anything about the situation.

The proper course of action for him was to tell Illinois, right from the start, "you had better sort this out immediately because if Blagojevich makes an appointment his appointee is the senator and there is nothing we can do about it".

Reid's incompetence, however, is such that he claimed he could do something about it which had to have sapped urgency in Illinois to some extent increasing the odds that they would dither and do nothing of use rather than either passing a new law governing filling senate vacancies, or managing to impeach and remove the governor in less than however many months it seems it will take them.

Reid, and the democratic party, however do have a move left to make: Burris is the senator, but he gets as little power as they can give him. Less than a republican. The party ejects him.

Get Leiberman in on the deal while you are at it.

But what will happen? They will embrace him. He is going to be one of them now. That is far more important than anything else (see Lieberman).

I think it's fair to say Reid's handling of this has been, for lack of a better word, clumsy

Could somebody explain to me how and why Reid ever became majority leader. For that matter, how did he ever get elected senator? He has the demeanor of a junior high geography teacher.

Save your dumping on Reid for when it really matters.

You mean, like when Reid says Ted Stevens shouldn't have to spend any time in jail because he's a war hero?

they neglected to pass a law stripping Blago of his right to appoint a new senator or a law calling for a special election. Either of those could have been done several ways, and quickly.

Wrong. Either of those requires changing the Illinois constitution.

I wonder if the Senate would have the ability to compel both Burris and Blagojevich to come to Washington and answer questions under oath concerning the process the Governor went thru to appoint Burris-- all as a prerequisite to seating Burris.

Danimal has it right - for all his bluster and grandstanding, Reid's options were quite limited.

It's a matter of state law.

Frankly, I thought Reid got it wrong from the start. It always seemed to me that there were three questions:

1. Did Blogojevich have the legal authority to make an appointment? (Not the moral authority; he has no moral authority whatsoever, and if he were a moral person he would have resigned some time ago.) The answer to this question is, clearly, "Yes."
2. Does Roland Burris have the Constitutional qualifications to serve in the senate? The answer to this question is, equally clearly, "Yes."
3. Did Blogojevich or Burris do anything illegal or corrupt in making and accepting the appointment? Based on the news reports, the answer to this question seems to be "No."

So what Blogojevich did was finesse the Senate. He fulfilled his (state) Constitutional responsibilities. He appointed a qualified person. There was no illegal or corrupt quid pro quo. (At least, none that we know of.) Sure, the Illinois legislature could have acted to change the situation, by legislating a special election or by impeaching and convicting Blogojevich quickly. But that didn't happen.

I hope Burris is savvy enough not to run for election in 2010. I hope Blogojevich disappears from the political scene in Illinois and in the US immediately. That seems to me to be the best possible ourcome at this time.

I say "Hear, hear!" to the Harry Reid comments above. He's ineffective, inarticulate, unintelligent and reflects poorly on the both the Senate and the Party.

Those of us who have Democrats representing us in the U.S. Senate should write to them and ask to have Reid replaced as soon as practicable. There are many who can do a great job, but I suggest Feingold.

I could never understand how they could deny any appointment Blago made so long as it was not made corruptly. Blago might have preferred to have profited from the appointment, but the notoriety denied him that chance. The glare of publicity forced him to make a clean appointment (or at least we're now presuming it's a clean appointment). Any grounds on which to deny Burris the seat in the United States Senate would seem to need to rest on any hint that he "bought" the seat as Blago hoped would happen. Questions posed to Burris should therefore focus on how to ensure that he did not "buy" the seat in some quid pro quo fashion, all in the name of ensuring that Blago's corrupt practices have not been implemented. If Burris is willing to answer those questions and provide those records, then he would seem to be worthy of assuming the seat. Hopefully he will be able to do that.

"He has the demeanor of a junior high geography teacher."

Harry the Flaccid makes my junior high geography teacher look like a steroidal, shaven-headed, heavily-tattooed maximum-security inmate who eats glass and craps nails.

There has not been a more comically ineffectual, feckless, incompetent, and impotent Majority Leader in either party in either house for the last 100 years.

Or to put it another way, Harry Reid is the Detroit Lions of the U.S. Senate. Always an epic fail.

Yo Prup, I think you missed Mar's point about those who use anonymous. That, concerning political parties, he feels the repubs more likely to want to hide their sexual orientation. ( L. Craig ) Also, though humor was the intent, I see the word 'republican' as the pejorative in his sentence. So, if there is bigotry, it is directed at republicans and not homosexuals. Am I correct Bil Mar?

I think there is a lot of blame to go around. It starts with the US Attorney stepping in before any deal was made. Considering that the Senate could have blocked anyone caught red handed doing a deal, it seems like the USA really screwed up.

The fact that it was Patrick Fitzgerald removed most of the skepticism among democrats and collectively a lot of rash statements were made.

Then the Illinois legislature failed to call a special election or pass a law changing how the appointment should be made.

But mostly everyone wanted to take the law into their own hands in the name of justice.

For some reason Reid decided that now was the time to stop sounding resigned to reality, his most practiced personality defect when he is about to let something happen that us liberals will hate. I mean, how many times has he played the "I'm powerless" card?

But he found that card again today.

Reid is powerless, in the sense that he has no legitimate basis for refusing to seat Burris. He should never have picked a fight he had no chance of winning. Time for a new majority leader.

I think it's fair to say Reid's handling of this has been, for lack of a better word, clumsy.

Actually, the right word is "bluff". Reid, Durbin, et al folded when Blago and Burris called the bluff.

Reid and Senate Dems take a hard line on corruption. There's obviously nothing wrong with that, but there was no real strategy in place to back it up.

It's wrong to write that in the past tense. Senate Dems do not now have a strategy to back up their stated "hard line" on corruption. Neither, apparently, do House Dems. In this, Congressional Dems are excruciatingly similar to Congressional Republicans.

Handle of the week: Bathrobespierre.

Well, you know, at least it's a novelty to see Harry cave to a DEMOCRAT. ;)

now that Reid has gotten the potential hypocrisy problem out of the way, can we seat Franken already???

Am I correct Bil Mar?

Yeah, and the name was supposed to be a clue. The intended target was actually those who promote anti-gay policies, while remaining closeted (anonymous). But apologies to Prup and anyone else I offended.

And don't forget the hard line taken with... Joe Lieberman. Democrats.. the new Republicans. :-(

Next time might consider thinking BEFORE you write -- for one thing, I don't promote anti-gay policies, and I'm not closeted.

I just wanted to note that Shortstop, among others, made a stupid analysis and conducted a worse argument: as others have said, you either believe in the rule of law, or you don't. Evidently, she does not -- and her political insights are damaging, when they are even intelligible.

Politically, to bluff and back down doesn't send the message that Shortstop hallucinated it would. She figured -- foolishly -- that the national Democratic party HAD to differentiate itself from corrupt Illinois politics.

So her approved method was to ignore the Constitution and make up stuff about the law. Yeah, that's a change to believe in. I pointed out a week or so back that over time this would make Obama and the Senate look more like Blagojevich, not less -- and that was days before it came out that Reid had been suggesting his own candidates for the Senate seat.

The monicker -- mine, yours, anybody's -- is less important than what folks SAY. Online, you are what you say, more or less -- and nothing else.

But I get tired of folks who have just two gears: they cheer, or they jeer.

It bugs me when there is a genuine question of principle, e.g., standing up for the Constitution and the law when it doesn't produce the result you want, and most of what we get here is typified by Shortstop's shallowness.

It's not complex, you know: when the Senate leader says "cannot", that's pretty definite. When he gets rolled, that's a clear result. Results count more than spin. It was a significant part of the failures of the Bush presidency that they didn't understand that -- facts count. The law counts. The Constitution counts.

So spinning it -- IN ADVANCE, no less -- as a 'necessary' gesture to show that the NATIONAL party has nothing to do with Blagojevich, actually has the opposite effect. You can see it in the polling data, which shows most Americans think that Burris shouldn't be seated. Why? Because Reid and Obama said his appointment "cannot" be acceptable....

.... and yet now they're gonna accept it. Does that help anybody's credibility?

So much for the political insights of the infielder playing shallow: missing an easy one that rolled right past. Yo, Shortstop: play deeper, and you'll have more range.

CJ wrote "Those of us who have Democrats representing us in the U.S. Senate should write to them and ask to have Reid replaced as soon as practicable."

I strongly agree with you. Unfortunately, I am residing in Indiana and have Evan Bayh as senator!

"Giving in altogether" is what Harry Reid does best. It's just usually Republicans who benefit.

Reid is behaving a lot like Bush and McCain - acting rashly, not thinking things through, ignoring complexity, nuance and the gray areas. How about soliciting an opinion letter from Patrick Fitzgerald, requesting a closed door briefing of the wiretaps, nothing public to taint a jury pool, just the facts.

I know that politics often times make people stupid, however, this whole thing with Blago and Burris a lot crazier than than Regular Stupid.

Virginia said

And I'm sure all of these Monday-morning quaterbacks would have handled it so-o-o much better. I mean, c'mon. This is basically a lose-lose situation and pretty unprecedented at that.

Totally correct.

In a lose-lose situation, you posture and look like you are "doing the right thing", even when you know you have to back down. In the present climate - following the Bush administration - the Dems couldn't be seen to welcome Burris with open arms, but they couldn't block him, either. So, posturing wass all they could do. It kept them looking honest in a bad situation. Blago put them all on the spot - twice. What the hell else were they supposed to do?

The way they handled it was to wring their hands and say, "Oh, we can't support such unpopular criminality, so we have to oppose anyone Blago names." - hoping that developments would shortcut Blago before he could name someone.

But since it went on as long as it did - with January 7th coming up quickly - they had to maintain that pure-as-the-driven-snow position when Blago caught them with their pants down. (But they should have anticipated it.)

BLAGO HAD TO NAME SOMEONE. ILLINOIS NEEDS A SECOND SENATOR. And from their POV, they needed his vote, with all the things Obama wants them to do.

Given Blago's naming Burris (which I thought was a brilliant move, BTW: Burris is respected and was completely removed from taint), they couldn't retreat - but they also knew that legally they didn't have a leg to stand on.

So, what did they do? Postured even more, to make it look like they were still 'doing the right thing'. Well and good.

And now, the legalities are out in the public domain and everyone sees that they have no choice. (This was always 'out there', actually.) So now they can wring their hands again and tell the world that their hands are tied, but they don't have any choice.

As soap opera, it isn't a bad performance. With nothing they could do about it, the best they could do was to look like they opposed it vehemently but then were forced into it by the letter of the law.

The moment I heard Blago named Burris, I knew it would play out like this, because the Senate had no leg to stand on, legally. I laughed out loud when I heard.

Blago trumped them all, but they got to play their hand-wringing best performances.

And IL will actually have a fairly decent Senator, who is respected in the state as an honest politician. How will he do in the Senate? Fair. he won't be a crook like Ted Stevens, but he isn't Barack Obama or Dick Durbin.

And Obama has that 59th Senator. Now if one of the GOoPer Senators would just keel over sometime soon. . .

.

The monicker -- mine, yours, anybody's -- is less important than what folks SAY. Online, you are what you say, more or less -- and nothing else.

You give the nameless a bad name.

anonymous: The monicker [sic] -- mine, yours, anybody's -- is less important than what folks SAY. Online, you are what you say, more or less -- and nothing else.

Indeed. Which is why you apparently had to run from the universally poor reputation you'd established here and elsewhere as theAmericanist. Did you think, though, when I made reference the other day to your demonstrable mental illness, that responding with near-obsessive postings to and about me (well, at least you finally acceded to my polite requests and stopped the late-night, incoherent and wholly unsolicited emails) would somehow mitigate everyone's perception of you as a complete psycho? What was that back there about judgment?

Your shameless misrepresentations--hell, outright lies--notwithstanding, I'm pretty comfortable with my record of posts on this topic. How about you, theAmericanist? Have you ever been comfortable?

BLAGO HAD TO NAME SOMEONE. ILLINOIS NEEDS A SECOND SENATOR.

No. They may want a second Senator, but they don't need one immediately. States have previously gone one Senator short, particularly due to illness (Tim Johnson was absent for most of 2007).

And Illinois, New York and Arizona each went effectively without a second Senator for months during the long presidential campaign.

Not much to say on the subj., Shortstop?

FWIW, this is how more sensible folks discuss this sorta thing:

It is not unreasonable to argue, as Shortstop and SteveGinIl have, that saying something, anything, to distance the national Democratic party from Blagojevich was necessary.

It IS unreasonable to argue -- as they both have -- that the approved way to do this was to bluff about blocking Burris, indeed "anyone" that Blagojevich appoints.

Sensible folks would regard this as a matter of principle: you're either for the rule of law, or you're not. I noted that Shortstop is not. Remember that, cuz the habit returns a lot.

The flaw in the "soap opera" line of reasoning, is that it disrespects the voters and misunderstands who the audience is.

The public opinion research does not back Shortstop here -- which is doubtless why she has nothing but insults to say. By making it a question of seating Burris or not, the public HAS moved toward the position that the Senate and the President-elect just abandoned. Shortstop's strategy of telling the voters something is "unacceptable" because you think they're stupid has, shall we say, limited utility.

Besides, the real audience for this sorta thing are political players. There was no need for the Senate, much less the President-elect, to get stuck trying to make a bow out of the tarry knot of Blagojevich's choosing whom to appoint. Sensible folks knew that all along. Curious how we got treated when we said so.

The message this little mess sent is that spin is more important than substance to some folks; that they can be hurried into taking a position and then forced to back down: and there will be folks who will rationalize that oh, no -- it was really brilliant strategy.

I don't think so, cuz of the points noted above.

A sensible person might respond to those points, insisting (f'r instance) that it doesn't actually matter that the leader of the US Senate was arguing a position against the Constitution, the law, and the precedents of the Senate, because... um, why?

Or that a President-elect REALLY needed to inject himself into this farce, because in the end it would be better if he... associated himself with a failed bluff?

I mean, you CAN argue those things -- but I note that these guys don't. I'm sometimes mean, which is why this is bad for my character, but I try real hard not to have ONLY 'you're an asshole" responses to real arguments. Now and then, somebody schools me -- and I like to learn.

LOL -- so I'll leave it here: Shortstop doesn't like me, because I was right and she was demonstrably wrong on a whole series of issues some time back, e.g., torture. I pointed out when it was still a live political issue, that the EFFECTIVE way to argue about torture is to begin with the fact that it fails as a tool to acquire intelligence or complete prosecutions. Then you can add that it is also cruel and immoral. But if you say it is cruel and immoral, and only THEN, as an afterthought, add that it doesn't work, the clear message is that security comes last, instead of first. It's an ineffective argument (helped Bush in 2004), and unnecessarily so -- you don't lose any of the moral arguments by noting the practical one first.

She had a series of conniptions that this was ... well, it was hard to tell what she thought, cuz she doesn't do argument well.

But in fact, over the past two years the public has turned decisively against torture in every particular BECAUSE OF A CASCADE OF EVIDENCE THAT IT DOESN'T WORK, notably by professional investigators.

No wonder Shortstop has nothing useful to say.

I might have been more sympathetic to "Bill Mar's" point -- which is a good one -- if he hadn't felt it necessary to use 'homosexual' as a pejorative. Please take your bigotry elsewhere.

"Homosexual" is now a pejorative?

Are you FUCKING KIDDING me?

We can't use the biologically correct word when referring to people attracted to the same sex, because it offends your delicate sensibilities? You need to read this Leonard Pitts column. It's about how political correctness run amok has turned us into a nation of hypersensitive wimps.

No. They may want a second Senator, but they don't need one immediately

Bullshit. The Senate needs all the Democrats it can get, and right now. If you do not understand why that is, you've had your head in the sand for the last eight years.

1. Did Blogojevich have the legal authority to make an appointment? (Not the moral authority; he has no moral authority whatsoever, and if he were a moral person he would have resigned some time ago.) The answer to this question is, clearly, "Yes."

I think people often confuse the law with the Law of Physics.

I expect that a very good lawyer could make a winning case that the Senate has the right to refuse to seat Burris given the allegations of corruption against Blagojevich are directly related to his attempts to sell the seat.

The Senate needs all the Democrats it can get, and right now. If you do not understand why that is, you've had your head in the sand for the last eight years.

What you mean is that Harry Reid needs all the Democrats he can get right now. That's because Harry Reid is a pathetic majority leader who doesn't know how to use the powers of his office to get things done.

Mitch McConnell didn't have much trouble getting unpopular legislation passed in the last session, despite having less than a majority himself. And Bill Frist pushed through some of the most egregious bills ever seen with far less than Reid has now.

(and please, don't argue that it's because Republicans are too mean and Democrats are too nice)

I expect that a very good lawyer could make a winning case that the Senate has the right to refuse to seat Burris given the allegations of corruption against Blagojevich are directly related to his attempts to sell the seat.

No very good lawyers seem to be rushing to do so, however. Huh.

Jiinchi sez: "I expect that a very good lawyer could make a winning case that the Senate has the right to refuse to seat Burris given the allegations of corruption against Blagojevich are directly related to his attempts to sell the seat."

You might expect that, but you'd be wrong. Do you really believe that the Senate has the "right" to overturn the law "given allegations"? When did "We, the People" give 'em that authority?

There are two basic questions here. The first is what authority, if any, the Senate has to EXCLUDE (not expel) a Senator. The second is what a court is authorized to decide.

On the first question, the Constitution is very clear, and there is a Supreme Court precedent that goes directly against your expectation. The Congress (both the House and Senate) can only decide the "qualifications" established by the Constitution. Burris fits 'em all.

If he was elected and the election was disputed, the way Landrieu's was in 1996 or Franken's is now, the Senate has fairly broad options to act independently to investigate the election itself. The House has sometimes, e.g., 1984 in Indiana's 8th district, counted the votes itself, for example, and in Landrieu's case, they followed the precedent of seating her while they decided whether there was anything to the charges that the election was fraudulent. (It wasn't.)

But for a Senator APPOINTED to fill a vacant seat, the Senate has very limited authority. They don't get to decide who is the governor of Illinois. They don't get to take over the process of removing Blagojevich -- an appointment is NOT like an election, where the Congress has broader powers.

That's the part that Shortstop, and you, are missing: this was a HUGE power grab for a simple majority of 51 Senators, to be able to reject a lawfully appointed Senator for any reason at all.

Which brings up the second question: what, if anything, could a court decide about that?

If a Federal court held that Blagojevich is governor and Burris has been appointed (the objection that the secretary of state hadn't signed the paperwork is frivolous), so the Senate seat is no longer vacant: what practical effect would that have had, should the Senate have refused to let him vote? None.

So far as I know, the Senate remains half of the legislative branch, over which the courts have very limited jurisdiction. So you'd be looking at a fullblown Constitutional crisis -- and one not easily resolved, since Burris could easily have had a court order on his side when (probably) Blagojevich would resign, and a new governor might have appointed somebody else. We'd have gone from the gerrymandering trick of politicians picking their voters, to Senators choosing their colleagues.

That's not a good place for American democracy to be, 8 years after Gore v Bush, with the Supreme Court -- ineffectually, perhaps -- deciding between two Senators, and quite probably for the one the Senate did NOT want and would not seat.

But wait, it gets better: what if instead, as you expect, a court had (God knows how, cuz it would require a lower court to overturn SCOTUS) decided to back the Senate in EXCLUDING (not expelling) Burris?

Look at it any way you choose, you'd have established that 51 Senators can reject the lawful choice of a state -- on "allegations" no less.

Do the math -- you can get 51 Senators with about 40% of the population. They might turn down an ELECTED Senator from California one day -- why not? You "expect" that they have the right, don't you?

Better to stick with the rule of law, starting with the Constitution.

It's not so much that there wasn't a strategy to back up the leadership's management of this, it's really more that there was no colorable substance for them to build a strategy on: no indictments, no convictions, not a legal leg to stand on. And if the remark about "an odd, self-aggrandizing Senator" is to be taken as somehow giving a criterion by which people should be refused a seat in the Senate, we'd have to remove a good two-thirds of the members.

On the first question, the Constitution is very clear, and there is a Supreme Court precedent that goes directly against your expectation. The Congress (both the House and Senate) can only decide the "qualifications" established by the Constitution.

1.) If the Constitution was very clear there would have been no precedent at all, since no one would have litigated the question.

2.) Your precedent was a 7-1 decision, implying at least one Justice would have disagreed with you on the original case.

3.) A single precedent hardly implies settled law.

4.) Precedents are not binding on future Supreme Court decisions and have even been overturned.

5.) Justices can even disagree with you that any precedent applies to a specific case.

Point being, if Reid wanted to fight the Burris appointment, he could make the attempt. Even if he lost such a battle, he'd look better than he does by simply capitulating (again). His opponents in the Senate are watching and will decide how to fight him on policy matters based on whether he's willing to follow through on his threats. I expect Mitch McConnell's job obstructing Democratic initiatives just got much easier, since there's simply no downside to opposing Reid.

But it's ridiculous to argue that he has no options at all.

I don't agree that it's the right call. And I'm amazed, speaking as a non-lawyer, at the superficiality of the legal discussions I've seen.

Blagojevich in making his decision was unable to carry out anything like a normal political process. Who could he talk to about this appointment? Everyone with genuine integrity would have to hang up the phone. What goals was he taking into account? At best, our answer would be "who can say?" At worst, a lot worse than that. Was his aim to serve the people of Illinois? That's very unlikely.

Imagine a governer who was completely clean but announced: "I'm planning to randomly select people from the phone book, and the first person I call who picks of the phone, meets the Constitutional qualifications, and agrees to tkae the job, I'll appoint him or her to the Senate."

Are we supposed to just assume that because the law is written to give the governor this authority, that this is a legal appointment? It's an abuse of power.

So is this. I think one of the big lessons of W is that how you come into power matters. Process matters. They came in in a slimy way, and it affected how they thought things should work.

sigh. sounds like an ineffective parent or teacher. Make disciplinary threats and never follow through, but believe over and over that the threat was enough. I wonder what kind of parent Reid is?