Can Harry Reid really deny Roland Burris a Senate seat? As Pejman Yousefzadeh points out, the Supreme Court seems to have ruled definitively on whether or not the Senate can refuse to seat a designee simply because they oppose the governor who named him. Yousefzadeh reviews the Supreme Court’s finding in the case of Powell v. McCormack, and concludes:
… we glean that so long as Roland Burris meets the qualifications for a United States Senator as set forth in the Constitution, he must be seated. Art. I, Sec. 3 of the Constitution states that “No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.” Roland Burris is more than “thirty Years” old, has been a citizen of the United States all of his life and is “an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.” He may be expelled or punished if he engages in misconduct while a member of the Senate, but I can’t see how he is prevented from taking his seat.
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