Roland Burris, Jan. 5, 2009: “The Lord put his hands on the governor and said, ‘This is the person that has to go to Washington.’”

Michele Bachmann, Oct. 14, 2006: “He called me to run for United States Congress”

Watch Burris’ press conference after the jump.

Al Franken (WDCpix)

In the first week of the 111th Congress, Democrats already have themselves in a pickle.

Party leaders hoping to block the appointment of Roland Burris to replace President-elect Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate are pointing to the same legal technicality that Republicans hope to use to keep Minnesotan Al Franken (D) from taking a seat of his own.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Under wildly different circumstances, neither Burris nor Franken has received official state certification to fill the seats — Burris because his appointment came under a cloud of scandal; Franken because his opponent has contested the razor-thin election results. As the new Congress prepares to launch with swearing-in ceremonies Tuesday afternoon, Republican leaders hope to use the lack-of-certification argument to block Franken. Some political experts say that Democratic leaders should tread carefully if they plan to refuse Burris for the same reason — or risk of falling victim to their own standards.

“Inconsistency can be a political problem for Democrats given how delicate this issue is,” Julian E. Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University, said in an email. “The Burris issue is front page news so this is not a decision that can be done and hidden … [I]f they are going to depend on a technicality to keep Burris out, they can’t ignore a similar technicality with Franken.”

Burris, a former Illinois attorney general, was appointed to the coveted Senate post last month by Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was arrested just weeks before for alleged attempts to auction off the upper-chamber slot. Democratic leaders — including Obama — have vowed to block Burris from taking the seat on account of the scandal surrounding Blagojevich. Illinois Sec. of State Jesse White on Monday provided party leaders with some justification when he refused to sign Burris’s election certification papers. White, who has repeatedly said he won’t certify any appointee of the embattled governor, cited a desire “to be true to my word.”

Undeterred, Burris said Monday that his appointment is perfectly legal, and the controversy swirling around it is an invention of the media. He said he has every intention of visiting the Capitol Tuesday to be sworn in.

“I am going there to be seated,” Burris said at an animated press conference as he was leaving Chicago for Washington Monday. “I am the junior senator from the state of Illinois. That’s all I can say.”

If Senate Democratic leaders turn him away at the chamber door, Burris added, “My lawyers will take it from there, and we’ll see what happens.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota’s state canvassing board on Monday certified Franken as the winner of his contest by a 225-vote margin over incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman (R). Coleman’s camp quickly vowed to file a lawsuit in Minnesota state court protesting the results. Minnesota state law prevents the election certification from becoming finalized until that legal process has ended.

Senate Republicans, led by GOP Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), have vowed to block Franken’s arrival until the lawsuit has played itself out. “There are a lot of questions about double-counted ballots, about absentee ballots that likely favor Norm Coleman that were refused to be counted by the canvassing board,” Cornyn told Fox News Monday. “These issues will all be worked out in court over the next few weeks. But, tomorrow, I do not think Al Franken will have a legal right to claim that Senate seat until all the votes are properly counted.”

Kathryn L. Pearson, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, said that, in light of the Burris episode, the Democrats’ success in seating Franken this week might hinge on how they present their argument.

“If the frame is about certification of elections, it does become complicated,” Pearson said. But if the frame is that the canvassing board has determined Franken the winner, she added, “then the case could be made that these are two very distinct situations.”

The Burris issue has become a thorn in the sides of Democrats, who are hoping to use a special provisional designation to solidify Franken’s spot in the upper chamber as quickly as possible — a designation granting all the voting and committee-assignment rights of the office, but making it easier to remove Franken if Coleman’s claims that he won are later discovered to be true.

Such a provisional designation is not without precedent. Following a tight Senate race in Louisiana in 1996, Democrat Mary Landrieu was seated “without prejudice” after her opponent brought charges of election fraud. (A Senate investigation found that the election irregularities were not enough to remove Landrieu from office. In November she was elected to her third term.)

Cornyn, who was recently elected to his second term, referred to such precedents as “ancient.”

In the eyes of some political experts, the entire episode is nothing more than a partisan jousting match with little lasting significance. Stephen Hess, a political scholar with the Brookings Institution, said the state-certification issue is “too inside-baseball” to resonate in any way that would foil the underlying plans of Democratic leaders.

“They’ll do what they want to do,” Hess said. “This thing is going to take a few days to play out — or a few weeks — but it really doesn’t have much political significance…It seems quite clear that very quickly there are going to be two new Democratic senators.”

Still, even Hess conceded that the arrival of Burris in Washington creates an unwelcome distraction for Democrats who’d hoped to use the momentum from November’s elections to move an enormous economic recovery package (among other party priorities) early this year.

“Blagojevich has put them in one hell of a bind,” Hess said. “It’s fascinating to watch them squirm their way out of it.”

Mike Lillis is the Congress Reporter for The Washington Independent.

The Barkley precedent stirs up unresolved questions about Minnesota’s ongoing Senate recount: Which major-party candidate will end up benefiting from Barkley’s third-party Senate run this year? And would Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty follow Blago’s example and fill a vacancy in Minnesota’s Senate contingent? And will the Senate be as willing to seat Burris or a Pawlenty pick as it was with Barkley eight years ago?

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura appointed Barkley, a fellow Independence Party stalwart, to fill out the remaining weeks of U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone’s term after his death just days before the 2002 election. Barkley was a third-party candidate for the office this year, drawing enough support (15 percent) to affect the result. But it’s still unclear whether Coleman or his Democratic rival Al Franken will be the ultimate electoral beneficiary of Barkley’s participation.

Meanwhile, Pawlenty has downplayed the likelihood that he’d exercise his option to fill a vacancy in the Wellstone/Barkley/Coleman seat. While the embattled Blagojevich may have little to lose, Pawlenty is busy parlaying his national stature as an also-ran for the GOP vice-presidential nomination into short-list status for the party’s presidential pick in 2012. That likely makes the political cost of any appointment to fill a Minnesota Senate vacancy untenable for T-Paw.

There’s also the question of the willingness of the U.S. Senate to seat either Burris or a Pawlenty appointee to the Minnesota Senate seat. The senators themselves hold the constitutional wild card in the process voters started Nov. 4 when they tried to choose a senator, and Majority Leader Harry Reid has already signaled opposition to seating Burris.

According to Time Out, a 20-something Blago staked out Nixon’s New York residence with a pal in 1980, angling for a photo and autograph. The picture surfaced in a profile of Blagojevich produced by Chicago public television station WTTW.

Listen to the WORT segment here and download the Ron Kuby show here.

According to the poll, 76 percent of respondents expressed approval of the Democrat’s handling of the transition period, with even 59 percent of Republicans sharing this view. In addition, 51 percent of those polled indicated that Obama had done enough to explain any discussions that his representatives have had with Blagojevich regarding the Senate seat, while 34 percent believed that the president elect needs to be more forthcoming about any communications.

Clockwise from upper left: Quinn, Blagojevich, Andersen, Rolvaag (MHS)

Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn is calling for the resignation of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a man with whom he shared a ticket but apparently little else (except antipathy). Despite making overtures and even having once defended his embattled boss’s integrity, Quinn says he hasn’t spoken to Blagojevich since Aug. 2, 2007.

That’s a contrast with Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Pawlenty stood by Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau and pleaded her case until the state Senate canned her from her moonlighting stint as state transportation commissioner in the wake of the I-35W bridge collapse — which by coincidence occurred the day before Quinn’s last talk with Blagojevich.

So things are different in Illinois and Minnesota, at least in that respect. But the distant relationship between Blagojevich and his second-in-command does have at least one parallel in Minnesota, from the time of the last great statewide election recount in 1962.

The rivals in the race for governor that year were the sitting governor, Republican Elmer L. Andersen, and the sitting lieutenant governor, DFLer Karl Rolvaag. (Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor in those days did not run together on a ticket, so the office-holders weren’t necessarily of the same party.) After each won election to two-year terms in 1960, their 1962 clash was inevitable, according to the 1964 book “Recount” by Ronald F. Stinnett and Charles H. Backstrom.

Rolvaag, who had already served three terms as lieutenant governor, and Andersen, a 10-year state Senate veteran, “had personalities and philosophies so different that they could only resolve into opposition for the governorship in 1962,” Stinnett and Backstrom wrote, adding:

Karl Rolvaag stated several times just prior to his ascension from the “broom closet” to the plush parlors of the Governor’s suite that he had been in the Governor’s office only twice during Andersen’s term.

(The “broom closet” was a small office to which Rolvaag decamped toward the end of the 139-day recount, to make way for A.M. “Sandy” Keith, a fellow DFLer whose separate election in 1962 to the office of lieutenant governor was undisputed.)

By the end of the recount, which gave Rolvaag a 91-vote victory over Andersen, the two men exhibited a civility toward one another not seen between Blagojevich and Quinn — or between current recount rivals Al Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman for that matter. Still, during the two years they spent working — in theory — together, the relationship was an arm’s-length one on par with the current occupants of Illinois’ Statehouse.

Andersen left Rolvaag alone to do the one duty of a lieutenant governor: oversee the state Senate, which then met only 90 days per year. He might have more profitably given Rolvaag something else to do, even running the state transportation department. Instead Rolvaag enjoyed plenty of spare time in which to plot his campaign to topple Andersen.

The Rolvaag-Andersen contest is one such rivalry that NPR’s Political Junkie blog cites in a useful overview of the governor-lieutenant governor relationship in America, inspired by Quinn’s comments Thursday. Today in 18 states, voters elect candidates to those offices separately. Among the other states, Illinois is one of seven in which candidates are nominated individually (running separately in party primaries in Illinois), only to unite on a single ticket for the general election.

That allows plenty of opportunity for potentially distant shotgun marriages around the country, though few reach the caustic depths of one calling for the other’s ouster as in Illinois today – or the razor’s-edge rivalry of Minnesota in 1962.

Wonkette gets its digs in on the “esteemed statistical clearinghouse,” USA Today, coming to North Dakota’s defense:

[O]ne arrives at this metric by dividing the number of political corruption convictions in the past ten years by the number of residents. Thus, low-population states with normal-sized governments are disproportionately “corrupt,” as evidenced by the shameful badge of corruption affixed to neighboring South Dakota and Montana. Meanwhile, the truly corrupt states (Rhode Island, anyone?) emerge a shade better, because they never bother to arrest, or god forbid convict, their political criminals. Instead, they elect them Mayor of Providence.

An editorial cartoonist’s dream, Blagojevich’s hair has been commented upon widely, including by many mainstream news outlets that see it as diagnostic of…something. The New York Times’ Gail Collins, wondering how someone with Blagojevich’s 13 percent approval rating won election in the first place, writes, “I am personally leaning toward the theory that it was the hair. Blagojevich tossed his thick brown mane and the voters told each other: ‘Yes, he sounds a little dumb. But truly, this is the hair of a reformer.’”

Then there’s the angle that Blago’s locks may mean he’s loco. The Chicago Sun-Times talked to psychologists who say the governor’s perfectly managed image and “grandiose sense of self” could be indicative of “narcissistic personality disorder” (the “hairbrained” story includes a reader poll: “Do you think Blagojevich is crazy?”).

And, of course, comedians are having a field day. Wonkette’s headline says the governor’s “terrible hair has been found guilty of everything,” while Jon Stewart reported that The Daily Show would have “complete coverage of Blagojevich tomorrow, including what I can only assume will be the filing of charges alleging beaver-pelt smuggling as well.”

Now, a look at the visual side of things:

In 2005, the blog The Inside Dope joked that the governor’s hair was going rogue:

A courtroom sketch this week by Cheryl Cook captures Blagojevich, apparently on his way to modeling sportswear in the 1983 JC Penney catalogue:

Then came the cartoonists, who seemed to give the hair equal billing to the “seat” Blagojevich wanted to sell (images via Political Humor at About.com):

Curiously, a look at Google Trends shows that during the last month, the number of American news references to “Blagojevich” was catching up to the number of media mentions for the more generic “hair.”

Update: David Brauer presents an eerie similarity (at least hairwise)– between Blagojevich and ousted Star Tribune CEO Par Ridder.

And from Mediation, one wild and crazy guy:

Got a favorite Blago image/story? Leave a link in comments.