Someone needs to send NBC’s Lee Cowen a copy of the constitution.

You may well have heard that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has supposedly decided to appoint former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to Barack Obama’s senate seat. I just watched Lee Cowen speculate that the U.S. Senate may just have to accept this because, after all, Blagojevich is the legally elected governor of Illinois and he has the sole power to decide this, in spite of Harry Reid’s objects.

Um, no.

Given the nature of this scandal, one might have thought that reporters covering the story would take two minutes to brush up on the appropriate section of the constitution. Since Mr. Cowen didn’t bother, I’ll provide this to any member of the media who wants to comment on this news story. It’s Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. constitution:

Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.

Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.

Neither House, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

Hey all, the links in my last post were not working when first posted. There’s a bug in some combination of the current version of the software I’m using wherein I often have to post, go back into edit mode, switch to HTML mode, hit update, then re-save the post in order for the links to work. Sorry. If you want to take a look at the post again, the links are working now. If you caught it via the LJ syndication, I don’t know if that gets updated when I update the post or not. You may need to come here to read it.  Sorry.

If you had difficulty with the link in this morning’s post, it’s fixed now. I’ve found a little bugginess with links since my last wordpress upgrade. I haven’t had the time to dig into whether there’s a fix for it and upgrade further. Sorry!

Well, if you read my last post and were totally effing confused by it, there’s a good reason. I pasted in the wrong damn link. The article that it all referred to was HERE

I’m fixing the original post right now. Damn, damn, damn.