Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. says he talked to the governor for 90 minutes about the Senate seat but was never solicited. Nor did he offer anything. Obama aides Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett both talked to Blagojevich about the seat, and Rahm talked to his chief of staff.
Neither claims to have been solicited for any kind of bribe.
Yet, if Blago were going to sell the seat, the obvious party to sell it to is the man with the power to appoint ambassadors and Cabinet officers, or to convince others to hire Blago: President-elect Obama.
Yet, from all we know, nether Barack nor anyone on his staff ever offered anything illicit to the governor, nor were they asked for anything. Where is the body of the crime?
If Blago and Burris hold firm, this is going to get interesting.
Here we have an African-American elder statesman of the Democratic Party, an honorable and distinguished man, appointed by the governor according to law and the Constitution, to fill a Senate seat. There has been no hint of illegal consideration asked or given by either the governor or Burris.
Yet Harry Reid, who presides over a Democratic caucus of some 60 senators, with not a single black member, is going to refuse this black man a seat to which the law entitles him?
One hopes Burris will stay firm and march up to that Senate, and, if nothing else, expose the hypocrisy.
Our president-elect is from a party that champions busing to integrate public schools but bypasses D.C. public schools to send his girls to exclusive private schools in far northwest Washington.
We have a Democratic Senate that champions affirmative action. Yet not one white male Democratic senator, in a caucus that has not a single black member, has ever volunteered to step down and let the governor of their state replace him or her with an African-American.
Not one. That would be liberals leading by example, not exhortation.
If Democrats believe our institutions of power should look like America, why don't they make their Senate caucus look like America? Why do not a dozen Democrat senators resign, to be replaced by 12 appointed black Democrats, giving one-fifth of all Democratic Senate seats to a minority that gave Barack 97 percent of its vote and Barack and Joe Biden one-fourth of all the votes they received?
Why does not Gov. Paterson follow Gov. Blagojevich's lead and name an African-American of Burris' stature to the U.S. Senate?
Fellas, let's start practicing what we preach here.