By Patrick Appel
I got side-tracked and haven’t been posting up on the Balgojevich story. Some reaction from around the web. Josh Marshall:
Even setting aside the primordial level of corruption of trying to sell the senate seat of the President-elect of the United States, I never fail to be amazed at the brazenness and stupidity of some political crooks. I mean, I think everyone involved in politics or interested in political corruption in the country had to know that Blagojevich’s phones were tapped and probably his offices were bugged, and that Pat Fitzgerald had him under the craziest level of scrutiny. And he tries to sell the senate seat with that hanging over his head? That’s simply amazing. I guess you could say he’s just a traditionalist, trying to keep up heritage of Chicago machine politics. But with some of these characters, it must just be pathological.
K-Lo:
This Illinois Senate-seat news is outrageous and shameful. That said, it warms my heart. Finally, a political scandal you can talk to your children about. No room at the Mayflower. No myspace page. No Gay-American announcement. Just good and evil and money and power corrupting.
Incredible. Blagojevich was already under investigation. And then he tries to sell Obama’s Senate seat? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this. This dude tried to auction the Senate seat of the President-Elect of the United States. Wow. They haven’t even invented a machine that can calculate the Fail Factor here. I do believe we have gone to Interstellar Fail. Intergalactic, perhaps.
oMoe Lane’s response is predicatable:
I think that not only should the President-elect fully endorse Senator Durbin’s call for a special election for the replacement seat; I think that Barack Obama should come back to his home state, mingle with his and Blagojevich’s fellow-Democrats, and heavily associate his name with whatever candidate that the Democratic wing of the Illinois Combine comes up with. It’ll fit in nicely with Blagojevich’s trial on corruption charges.
As is Lowrey’s:
Blagojevich and Rangel are obviously first steps toward Democrats taking over the mantle of corruption from the Republicans.
Volokh on the legal issues at stake:
…my sense is that political deals of the "I appoint your political ally to X and you appoint me to Y" variety are pretty commonplace, though perhaps done with more subtlety than seemed to be contemplated here. Should these deals indeed be treated as criminal bribery? Have they generally been so treated?…the government’s theory, I take it, would apparently treat such a deal as a federal crime — assuming the federal jurisdictional requirements are met — even if it were a standalone deal by an otherwise uncorrupt official. So that, I think, makes it worth considering how the law should treat these sorts of deals involving political appointments.
Nate Silver thinks it may put some IL seats in play:
The Republicans are extremely disorganized in Illinois, but both the governor’s seat and Obama’s senate seat now need to be considered viable pickup opportunities for them in 2010. The Republican with the strongest statewide brand name is former senator Peter Fitzgerald, who retired from the Senate in 2004. With that said, the Democrats have several rising stars of their own, such as Alexi Giannoulias, Jan Schakowsky, Lisa Madigan, and Luis Guiterrez, all of whom have pretty clean reputations.
Kevin Drum sums up the blogospheres reaction as a whole:
Thanks partly to this being a slow news day and partly to the sheer juiciness of the whole thing, the blogosphere is ablaze with chatter about the arrest of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges. Main theme: the guy has been under investigation for three years by the same prosecutor who convicted both Scooter Libby and the previous governor of Illinois, but he was merrily blathering away to friends anyway about selling off Barack Obama’s senate seat to the highest bidder? What kind of fucking moron is this guy?
The Dish 