The chorus of calls for Senator Roland Burris to step down are growing louder and adding insult to injury today his spokesman stepped down. Jason Erkes said in a written statement to CNN:
“I initially began helping the senator on a temporary basis because he is a long-term friend who I served several years when he was [Illinois] attorney general. ”It is now time for me to get back to focusing on … my newly formed strategic communications business.”
Things really don’t look good for Burris. The Senate Ethics Committee has launched an investigation due to the “disclosures that Burris spoke with Rod Blagojevich’s brother about possibly raising money for the former governor,” and the Sangamon County, IL, state attorney is “also considering whether to file perjury charges against Burris.”
CQ Politics reported today that the “names of lobbying clients that Sen. Roland W. Burris declared to a state legislative panel do not match those on records he filed over the last decade with Illinois and Chicago agencies.”
Burris is defiant and insistent that he’s done “nothing wrong” and has “absolutely nothing to hide.” Those claims are not quelling the writing on the wall however that Roland Burris’ very short days in the Senate look to be numbered.
Even a group of black ministers who initially supported Burris as he fought to get the Senate job after Blago named him as Obama’s replacement, are now planning to ask for his resignation.
The Democratic party deserves better than this at this point. Roland Burris, how long before you go?
As usual, I’m the odd woman out. I agreed totally with the retiree quoted today when he said, parenthetically, move on Illinois. You’ll get to vote someone else in within 2 years.
This is all nothing but “fluffandnutter.”
So let me see if I have this straight…Senator Burris may, MAY have lied in some testimony and so there is a bruehaha and screaming for him to resign and an investigation. The Torturer in Chief and his crime family are DIRECTLY responsible for the deaths of at LEAST hundreds of thousands of humanbeings, have DEFINITLY committed war crimes and attempted to utterly subvert the Constitution of the United States and there is NO movement what so ever to investigate them and hold them accountable.
Makes sense to me!
As always, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. There is nothing terribly untoward in fundraising as a quid pro quo. (And before Clintonites get their panties in a bunch about that statement, they need to tell me what they thought Denise Rich’s $450,000 contribution to the Clinton library was all about.)
The problem is, he looks to have perjured himself. And his perjury goes not to personal peccadilloes (which are nobody’s business), but to the actual office itself and the manner in which he was appointed to it. I don’t think Illinoisans deserve a Senator who, if the reports are true, literally lied himself into office.
So I think Burris should resign. And I expect he will, sooner rather than later.
Maybe ogen……but I think he’s of the age where he knows precisely what he is doing.
I think this story is truly the big race story.
What he did was absolutely peanuts compared to what the “boyz” have been doing for years.
I think he’s making a very real statement. I rather like him, btw.
He’s a guy who is a whole lot smarter than people think.
*nuance*