It's Lonely Being Burris

Even in a Senate club famous for how it ostracizes the unwanted, the shunning of Democratic Sen. Roland Burris is unprecedented.

Tainted from the day he was appointed by ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and resented by Senate leaders who allowed themselves to be coerced into seating him, Burris has never risen above outcast in the august 100-member chamber.

The evidence is everywhere he goes on Capitol Hill.

Colleagues, with little to say to him besides hello, beat a path around him on the Senate floor. None of the Senate's tribal customs of collegiality and acceptance -- backslapping, hugging, arm-touching and collaborating on legislation -- is bestowed upon Burris. The 71-year-old freshman has not been taken under a wing of a veteran senator.

Burris often can be found standing between colleagues otherwise engaged, seeing the backs of their heads.

The other senator from Illinois, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, did the senatorial equivalent of telling him to resign. Burris refused, denying all wrongdoing in a suspected pay-to-play scheme. Even so, Democrats made clear they will not support him if he runs next year for the seat that President Barack Obama won in 2004.

In the meantime, Burris joins a prestigious pantheon of the Senate's unwanted.

But even there, he doesn't exactly fit in. Burris' unsavoriness, real or perceived, doesn't rise to the level of wrongdoing that has inspired senators-past to expel 15 members or to censure nine. Their transgressions ranged from treason during wartime to abusing colleagues, sexual harassment and corruption.

"What distinguishes it is the governor who appointed him, and the cloud that the governor was under, and the implication that this appointment was done for corrupt reasons," said Ross K. Baker, author of "Friend and Foe in the U.S. Senate" and a political science professor at Rutgers University.

Burris' "colleagues would view a too-close association with him as being a kind of contamination," Baker added, "in a sense that he personally is an inoffensive guy, but he's a carrier of the pathogen of Blagojevich."

There's a sense that Burris isn't long for the Senate.

The ethics committee and a state prosecutor are investigating whether he lied under oath when he did not reveal to Illinois lawmakers what an FBI tape confirmed: that he discussed raising money for Blagojevich and his desire for Obama's seat in the same conversation with the governor's brother.

Burris told The Associated Press that he wasn't asked about a conversation with the governor's brother and saw no reason to volunteer the information.

Burris' camp attributes the ill will to those in power who had hoped Blagojevich would appoint someone else.

"There is a concerted effort to destroy" his reputation, Burris' political consultant Delmarie Cobb said Monday.

Democrats initially saw no upside to allowing Burris to be seated, citing the Constitution's requirement that each chamber of Congress determines its own membership. In the end, they allowed House members, chiefly Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., to force their hand. Rush dared them to turn away a man who would be the Senate's only black member and alienate a critical Democratic constituency just as the party had delivered the nation's first black president.

Teeth were gritted; Burris was seated.