Burris has right to serve in Senate, follow Truman's footsteps

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris' record suggests he will make a very mediocre and probably very embarrassing U.S. senator. But there should be no doubt about his legal right to take the seat.

Burris was named by his old boss and political master, disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, to take the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. But Burris' critics are already legion, and he already has been subjected to slights and rejections that no U.S. senator has experienced in a half-century since red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., was first censured by the Senate and then literally drank himself to death.

Burris is already identifying himself to news media as "the junior senator from Illinois." But on Tuesday, he was turned away by the Senate.

Senate Democrats refused to accept Burris' credentials. Democratic Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White has refused to co-sign the certification of Burris' appointment because of the ongoing criminal investigation and impeachment effort against Blagojevich. The Senate Dems are talking about the idea of seating Burris, who seems to have no involvement whatsoever in the scandals surrounding the governor, as long as he agrees not to run in 2010. But this clearly is not a legally enforceable arrangement.

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is clearly unhappy with Burris entering the Senate, one of his most powerful colleagues, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the current head of the Senate Rules Committee, broke ranks Tuesday and said flatly that Burris was qualified and should be seated.

In terms of experience in the political arena, there is no question that Burris is qualified for the Senate. He has served long as Illinois attorney general, running the legal processes of one of the most populous states in the Union. His record was far from stellar, but not at all embarrassing either. Blagojevich, in naming Burris, described him as "a good and decent man with a long history of public service in Illinois." Political insiders in Illinois say that is, as far as it goes, a truthful assessment.

There is no question that Burris played the political game with the Blagojevich political machine -- or "Blagosphere" -- that has run Illinois with crass abandon over the past decade. The Chicago Sun-Times has claimed that Burris, the lobbying firm he employed, his clients and the law firm of Gonzalez, Saggio & Harlan where Burris currently works as a senior counsel have in all contributed $127,986 to Blagojevich since he took office. But that is not illegal, and it is certainly the way political business is done in Illinois and most other parts of the United States as well.

It was certainly the case that Burris' record as attorney general was hardly stellar. It was marked by extreme caution and a political timidity in refusing to reopen at least one murder case in which there was very strong evidence to suggest that Rolando Cruz, a condemned man on death row, was innocent of the murder of a 10-year-old girl. Burris failed to investigate the matter and took his assistant attorney general, Mary Brigid Kenney, who had become convinced of Cruz's innocence, off the case.

Burris' vastly inflated sense of self-importance may also embarrass his party and his president in the Senate. The Chicago Tribune this week described him as having "always maintained an outsized political ego even larger than that required of most politicians." And Burris lost no time in claiming that in choosing him, Blagojevich had selected "the most qualified person in the state of Illinois to ... serve out the term of Barack Obama."

Still, while Blagojevich has been taped and will be facing prosecution on charges of trying to sell Obama's Senate seat for cash, he has not been convicted yet and hasn't stood down from his elected position as governor of Illinois either.

Blagojevich is therefore well within his rights to select Obama's successor, and however deficient Burris may appear in terms of personality, character and leadership, he has certainly got the intellect, expertise and experience to do the job.

Twentieth century U.S. history provides many occasions of appointees to high office who at first were despised as political hacks, or worse, growing in stature and achieving great things.

Justice Clarence Thomas was sensationally accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill when he was selected for the Supreme Court in 1991, but Thomas has served with distinction on the court as one of the leading advocates of conservative legal principles of his generation.

In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt picked Sen. Hugo Black, D-Ala., for the Supreme Court, and it was then revealed that Black for years had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet he went on to champion desegregation and become one of the greatest champions of racial equality and justice in the history of the Court.

Perhaps the case most analogous to Burris', however, is that of an obscure Missouri judge who was picked by the notorious Kansas City Machine of "Boss Tom" Pendergast to run for a Senate seat in 1934.

Pendergast presided over a cesspool of gambling, prostitution and organized crime that was one of the worst in the nation. Yet that derided "hack" became one of the outstanding senators of his generation. He exposed at least $3 billion worth of waste and corruption during World War II and served for eight years as a now fabled president -- his name was Harry S. Truman.

Burris' track record makes him appear unlikely to emulate the now revered Truman, but he could prove to be a pleasant surprise in the Senate yet.