by Mark Silva
There's no talking about the political and possibly legal showdown between Roland Burris and the Senate's Democratic leaders looming in Congress next week without talking about "the race card.''

"There are no African-Americans in the Senate," says Rep. Bobby Rush (pictured right), a Chicago Democrat and co-founder of the Illinois Black Panther Party. "And I don't think that anyone, any U.S. senator who's sitting in the Senate, right now, want to go on record to deny one African-American from being seated in the U.S. Senate."
That would be Burris, the first black official elected statewide in Illinois (both comptroller and attorney general), and now Gov. Rod Blagojevich's appointee for the vacant Senate seat of President-elect Barack Obama, who was the only African-American member of the Senate.
The Senate's Democratic leaders - with the full backing of Obama himself - vow to block Burris' seating in the Senate - not because of Burris himself, but because of who is appointing him, the Illinois governor who stands accused by federal authorities of attempting to sell Obama's seat to the highest bidder.
Neither Burris nor Obama nor any of the Senate's leaders want to make this a racial issue. But Rush and others stand ready to make that implication.
"I would ask you to not hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer," Rush said Tuesday in promising to lobby congressional leaders vowing not to seat Burris or anyone else appointed by the embattled two-term Democratic governor of Illinois.
This morning on CBS News' The Early Show, Rush suggested that those attacking Blagojevich should "chill.''
"I think what needs ... to happen now is that all these folks who are opposed to Gov. Blagojevich, they need to take a chill pill," Rush said. "We're still a nation of laws and I believe that Roland Burris and Gov. Blagojevich, they're on solid constitutional grounds in terms of ... him being selected. I think the U.S. Senate will have to accept him."
And Burris, appearing this morning on WGN-TV in Chicago, defended Rush's comments and maintained that the South Side congressman is not playing racial politics. Rush, Burris said, is just relating "facts and not playing the race card and not being emotional about it."
Donna Christensen, the congressional delegate to Congress from the Virgin Islands and an African American, had something to say about this today on the radio - on The Takeaway with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji on WNYC and Public Radio International.
(Rep. Bobby Rush, pictured at the center above, with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, left, and the governor's appointee for the Senate, Roland Burris. (AP Photo by M. Spencer Green)