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Blago's gambit
So the embattled Governor of Illinois is making an appointment to fill Obama's vacant Senate seat after all. (Steve Benen has a number of useful comments and links.) By choosing Roland Burris, a retired pol with an upright reputation, who is furthermore Black, Blagojevich may have thought he'd outwitted the view that anything he touches is tainted, but with Obama himself publicly objecting to the appointment, that might not fly.
I am, however, less interested in the practical political question here than the legal one. Harry Reid announced after the Governor's indictment that the Senate would refuse to seat any appointment he made. Can they do that? Well, they can, insofar as the Senate has the power to judge the qualifications of its members. Burris could go to court and challenge their right to refuse to seat a duly legally-appointed senator, but that would take time.
The Senate has occasionally refused to seat elected senators with legal certificates of election, on the grounds of corruption or unreliability of the results. (The 1974 New Hampshire election, which ended in an effective tie, was the most notorious such case.) That's not the case here, of course; nor is there any question of Burris not being personally qualified to hold a seat by reason of age or citizenship or - at least so far as we know - personal corruption, all of which have been used to reject potential senators in the past.
In the days when state legislatures elected senators, governors were enabled to appoint senators if the vacancy occurred outside of legislative sessions. When the legislature deadlocked on a vote (which happened quite often in the late 19th century), a governor would occasionally make an appointment, but these were rejected by the Senate on the grounds that the legislature was in session, and if it chose not to elect, that was its own business and not the governor's.
Since popular election of senators was instituted, I know of only one case where a gubernatorial vacancy-filling appointment was rejected. A Senator from Alabama died in 1913. The Governor's first appointment was challenged and the appointee's credentials were withdrawn. A second appointee was declared not entitled to the seat by Senate resolution. The seat was eventually filled by special election nine months after the predecessor's death.
What I don't know is the Senate's justification for the challenge and rejection. Googling the appointees' names hasn't turned up anything useful. The Congressional Record for that period isn't online, and the libraries where I could get it are closed today. I could have done it yesterday, but I was out most of the day helping concoct Potlatch programming. (You should come: it's going to be good.) Actually, I've known of this case since I first appointed myself a Senate buff at the age of 15, but I never thought it worthwhile to look up the details before now. You'll probably read about it here when I do.
One thing's for sure: if Blagojevich does issue an official appointment credential to Burris - I'm not clear on whether he's done it yet - then he goes into my online database of senators even if the Senate rejects him outright, as I've done for all previous cases of rejected appointments. However, not yet. Normally I'd have entered the newly-elected senators by now, but what with the still-unresolved dead heat in Minnesota, and with four senators resigning to take executive branch office, and this fuss over the appointment to replace one of them, I'm not touching the database until the dust settles.
I am, however, less interested in the practical political question here than the legal one. Harry Reid announced after the Governor's indictment that the Senate would refuse to seat any appointment he made. Can they do that? Well, they can, insofar as the Senate has the power to judge the qualifications of its members. Burris could go to court and challenge their right to refuse to seat a duly legally-appointed senator, but that would take time.
The Senate has occasionally refused to seat elected senators with legal certificates of election, on the grounds of corruption or unreliability of the results. (The 1974 New Hampshire election, which ended in an effective tie, was the most notorious such case.) That's not the case here, of course; nor is there any question of Burris not being personally qualified to hold a seat by reason of age or citizenship or - at least so far as we know - personal corruption, all of which have been used to reject potential senators in the past.
In the days when state legislatures elected senators, governors were enabled to appoint senators if the vacancy occurred outside of legislative sessions. When the legislature deadlocked on a vote (which happened quite often in the late 19th century), a governor would occasionally make an appointment, but these were rejected by the Senate on the grounds that the legislature was in session, and if it chose not to elect, that was its own business and not the governor's.
Since popular election of senators was instituted, I know of only one case where a gubernatorial vacancy-filling appointment was rejected. A Senator from Alabama died in 1913. The Governor's first appointment was challenged and the appointee's credentials were withdrawn. A second appointee was declared not entitled to the seat by Senate resolution. The seat was eventually filled by special election nine months after the predecessor's death.
What I don't know is the Senate's justification for the challenge and rejection. Googling the appointees' names hasn't turned up anything useful. The Congressional Record for that period isn't online, and the libraries where I could get it are closed today. I could have done it yesterday, but I was out most of the day helping concoct Potlatch programming. (You should come: it's going to be good.) Actually, I've known of this case since I first appointed myself a Senate buff at the age of 15, but I never thought it worthwhile to look up the details before now. You'll probably read about it here when I do.
One thing's for sure: if Blagojevich does issue an official appointment credential to Burris - I'm not clear on whether he's done it yet - then he goes into my online database of senators even if the Senate rejects him outright, as I've done for all previous cases of rejected appointments. However, not yet. Normally I'd have entered the newly-elected senators by now, but what with the still-unresolved dead heat in Minnesota, and with four senators resigning to take executive branch office, and this fuss over the appointment to replace one of them, I'm not touching the database until the dust settles.
no subject
One thing I trust will not happen: they won't seat Burris and then expel him. They don't have the necessary votes for that, and there's no grounds for doing so.