So Blago makes a Senate appointment--of Roland Burris, the first
African-American to be elected statewide in Illinois, at a moment
when no other blacks sit in the Senate. And the Dems say
they won't seat Burris. Won't this be fun!
My friend Robert A. George of the New York Post (and
former Gingrich aide) peers
into the future:
Obama supports Harry Reid and the US Senate's assertion
that they will refuse to seat any Blagojevich-appointed
senator. But, the issue of whether the Senate can block this
appointment could end up in the Supreme Court. In a previous
decision involving, yes, a black member of the House, New York
Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the court determined
that the chamber could only assess the objective
"qualifications" of a member -- age, citizenship,
residency, etc -- in deciding whether to seat him. Reid claims
that the Senate is a different chamber, not bound by that
precedent. We shall see. Regardless, anyone want to guess what
Bobby Rush might be doing while the high-court of the land is
deciding whether a black man should be allowed to sit in the
Senate?
Such a scenario would be a nightmare for Obama, whose entire
campaign -- and political life story -- is about bridging
America's racial divide. Instead, the immediate fallout of his
successful run for the presidency has been a farcical RNC
campaign over Obama's cultural identity as the "magic negro"
and now a potentially far more ominous racial conflagration
over his former Senate seat.
Ain't politics wonderful!?
About the Author
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
