Putting Things in Perspective: Which is the party of corruption in Illinois?

I don’t believe Reid and the Senate have any recourse but to seat Burris: the precedent of Powell vs. McCormack (1969) seems clear in this case.

I think Anthony is correct on this. The Senate is the judge of the election of it’s members and can refuse to seat an elected member if they question the results. They did that, if I recall, regarding a Senate seat in NH in the 1970s. However, it doesn’t appear that that power extends to appointments.

Any lawyers who know this terrain better?

I guess conservative bloggers and pundits should stop writing about Rahm Emanuel’s contacts with Blago, too, even though it appears that no quid pro quo was involved there, either?

Come on, ST…you know Anthony, Leslie, and me better than that. Of course you shouldn’t stop working that angle. The difference betweeen that and the Reid issue is that Obama and his gang immediately started lying about Emanuel’s contacts with Blago. A cover-up is certainly worth writing about.

The current Congress and the next administration will give us plenty of opportunities to show them as the corrupt charlatans they are…witness the Richardson and Clinton problems you’ve already noted. And if you wanted to show what the Democrats think of, say, paying taxes, you couldn’t come up with a better poster boy right now than Charlie Rangel and his current problems with the IRS. We conservatives should hammer every such opportunity mercilessly.

Is Reid a hypocrite on this? Of course. I’d expect nothing more from the left. It’s part of their DNA. But it’s not the same as having “dirty hands in the Obama seat cookie jar”. That implies a lot more – I read it as putting him in the same gutter as Blagojevich. By all means, let’s enjoy their predicament, but understand that what Reid did wasn’t wrong per se.

The Obama campaign howled about racism almost every time anyone dared oppose him. I don’t want us to turn into a distorted mirror image of that, finding wrongdoing in everything the other side does. By 2010, I’d love to see all the left’s doubletalk rolled up into a hard-hitting media campaign, but that should be a tasty side dish. The main course should be the Rezkos, Hsus, Blagojeviches, Rangels, Dodds, Franks, ACORNs, etc. That is how we can defeat them.

Third, Reid and the U.S. senate have a right to refuse to seat an appointee if they think that person’s ability to serve is tarnished by one’s own deficiencies or if the appointment is deemed disqualified due to non-compliance with ethical standards by the appointer (Blagojevich).

On the contrary, I don’t believe Reid and the Senate have any recourse but to seat Burris: the precedent of Powell vs. McCormack (1969) seems clear in this case. They can try to expel him after he’s seated, but that creates its own problems.

I find no source of amusement here.

I am from Illinois, and I can tell you for a fact that there are far more corrupt Democrat congressmen than Republican congressmen. The Democrats don’t get exposed, because of the work of the political machines and the MSM, and the corruption of those who do is downplayed.
It’s time to lift that rock and bring some light to what’s living underneath it.

The last several years have shown us that if we wait for the GOP leadership to take the bull by the horns as it relates to Dem shenanigans, we’ll be waiting forever. The Reid story is just part of a pattern of say one thing, do something different with the lot of the left in DC. I’m glad to see that John Coryn is asking questions, even if most of the rest of the GOP are not:

“For the last several weeks, Senator Reid has led the charge to deny the people of Illinois a voice in choosing their next U.S. senator in a special election” Cornyn said in a Saturday afternoon statement. “Now we learn that Senator Reid also took the extraordinary step to lobby against two sitting U.S. congressmen and the state senate Majority Leader in Illinois, and instead told Governor Blagojevich that he supported an appointment for an individual [Duckworth] who recently lost a U.S. House election.”

“The people of Illinois deserve a simple explanation from Senator Reid – why does he believe these three Illinois officeholders are ‘unelectable’ to the U.S. Senate?” Cornyn added.

Heck, for that matter, even Chris Bowers at Open Left smells a rotten egg:

[..]Further, if Reid and Senate Democrats are motivated at least partially by “electability,” to what extent is that “electability” based on fear of Illinois not backing another African-American, even after Barack Obama and Carol Mosley Braun previously held this seat? It is fairly obvious that played a role. Yet further, to what extent was Madigan’s attempt to remove Blagojevich from office based on her personal Senate ambitions? It is also kind of funny that Reid considered Tammy Duckworth more “electable,” even though she couldn’t win a Democratic-leaning congressional district in Illinois despite receiving more DCCC backing in 2006 than any other Democratic candidate. She barely even won her primary.

One of the major problems here is the corruption associated with the concept of “electability” itself. Not only is it anti-democratic, but in truly retrograde fashion it reinforces oppressive cultural perceptions–such as African-Americans being unelectable, and Democrats needing to turn to veteran’s in order to shore up foreign policy credentials–rather than challenging them. To a large extent, the Constitutional method of appointing Senators, rather than holding special elections, is itself to blame. Additionally, the lack of intra-party democracy and top-down elitism of our political process is also to blame. None of these problems would have occurred if we had simply held an election, and engaged in the radical experiment of letting the people decide.

Concepts like “electability” are part of a broader corrupting system. Selling Senate seats for cash may be obviously corrupt and illegal, but using political leverage to clear primary fields and rule out entire groups of people from holding office isn’t much better.

AllahPundit makes a good point here, as well, as it relates to the race angle:

Shed no tears for Dingy Harry over the demagoguery to come. He sowed the wind; let him reap the whirlwind.

He’s exactly right. Reid tried to paint the GOP’s connecting Franklin Raines to Obama as “racist” – so if Bobby Rush (and other race baiters in the Democrat party) goes after Reid for wanting to exclude the three black candidates on the basis of “electability” I’m going to relish their questioning him on it and write about it, with interest. Dems eating their own over an issue that normally they tie Republicans in knots over? I’m all for it.

As the last several decades have shown us, we can’t rely on the mainstream media to do their part, either, so it’s up to primarily the conservative media (bloggers, pundits) and Fox News to keep the fires on legitimate stories like this one burning. If it helps keep this story out there, that’s great, if not, at least we can’t say we didn’t try. Stories like this are ones that will keep the Democrats off their game and give the GOP a bit of an edge (whether or not they’re willing to work for it) as the new Congress prepares to be seated for the first time next week. We need whatever traction we can get.

I’m not sure whether anyone in the GOP leadership has the inclination to launch a full-scale “culture of corruption” type assault during the 2010 midterm election campaign.

Considering that our friends on the left have been rather successful with the “corruption is a republican problem” meme, I doubt that the GOP would want to go there.

There are plenty of corrupt Democrats out there, Democrats who have made the news by being criminally charged and in some cases convicted, but, at the moment, the majority of corrupt congressmen in recent years have been Republicans: Mark Foley, Bob Ney, Randy Cunningham and ted Stevens. To find a majority of corrupt Democrats, you have to go to state legislatures (Senator Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia), mayors (a bunch of them) and gubernatorial seats (Mr Blagojevich).

ST continues to hold on to the big stir stick in order to keep stirring the pot …

Unfortunately, with the size of this pot, a swizzle stick will be sufficient. Anyone can offer advice, and without some sort of quid pro quo blatantly offered, the media will not allow this story to fester and grow. Our friends on the left and their willing accomplices in the professional media will keep this a Blagojevich story, period.

But if they do plan to use it, I hope someone is building an arsenal of all the video clips, news summaries, and sound bites they can use in 2010. And then find a GOP equivalent of Carville or Axelrod to implement it.

As for the racism angle, that will go nowhere, I’m afraid. Like sexism and terrorism, racism is always overlooked as long as the perpetrator is on the left. We can point out the hypocrisy, but until the black population is willing to recognize it and vote against it – and all indications are that they’re not – it’s a one-day story, nothing more.