Roland Burris Appointed To Obama’s Senate Seat

VPM | By Alex Cohen and David Schaper

Published December 30, 2008 at 8:03 PM EST

Updated July 11, 2023

ALEX COHEN, Host:

This is Day to Day from NPR News. I’m Alex Cohen.

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And I’m Madeleine Brand. Coming up, how to live frugally in a recession. The web offers a few suggestions.

COHEN: First though, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has named his choice for President-elect Barack Obama’s now-vacant U.S. Senate seat. Blagojevich is appointing the state’s former attorney general. He’s 71-year-old Roland Burris. Here is Governor Blagojevich speaking about this decision earlier this afternoon in Chicago.

ROD BLAGOJEVICH: He will be a great United States senator. And now, I’d like to ask everyone to do one last thing. Please, don’t allow the allegations against me to taint this good and honest man.

COHEN: Governor Rod Blagojevich making reference there to allegations that he tried to sell Barack Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. For more on today’s announcement, we’re joined my NPR’s David Schaper. And, David, this choice to replace Barack Obama of Roland Burris, tell us a little bit about him. Who is he?

DAVID SCHAPER: So he had a futile record in the last, you know, decade or decade and a half, but he is somebody who’s well known and well liked by most people in Illinois, and it’s probably a pretty safe choice for Blagojevich, if he’s allowed to be seated in the U.S. Senate, which I think there’s a lot of question about still.

COHEN: We’ll get to that in just a moment. First, let’s speak a little bit about Roland Burris. He actually spoke at today’s press conference. What did he have to say about the announcement?

SCHAPER: And Mr. Burris appeared to be in line with the governor’s thinking, and that is that it’s too critical a time for the state to go many, many months possibly without a U.S. senator and so that the position needs to be filled by somebody who’s got a lengthy career of public service and despite the allegations against the governor doesn’t mind being appointed by this governor to fill up the remainder of Barack Obama’s Senate term.

COHEN: Democratic leaders in the Senate have said they won’t seat anyone appointed by Governor Rod Blagojevich, and the secretary of state there in Illinois says he won’t even accept the paperwork. So what happens from here, David?

SCHAPER: But, you know, the words of Harry Reid again today are clear that they’re not going to accept this nomination, and Jesse White, who is also a very prominent African-American politician in the state of Illinois, the secretary of state, said he’s not even going to accept the paperwork. So that leaves a lot of questions still up in the air as to what happens with the appointment going forward.

COHEN: NPR’s David Schaper talking about the announcement today from Governor Rod Blagojevich that he has picked Rolland Burris to fill the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Thank you, David.

SCHAPER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Alex Cohen

Alex Cohen is the reporter for NPR's fastest-growing daily news program, Day to Day where she has covered everything from homicides in New Orleans to the controversies swirling around the frosty dessert known as Pinkberry.

Though based at NPR West in California, she's traveled to Des Moines to cover the first-in-the-nation caucus in 2008; to Paris (Texas, that is) to report on a devastating drought and to the far corners of the Navajo Nation to profile a politician forced to choose between his tribe and the New Mexico Senate.

Cohen also fills in as the host of Day to Day. With her colleagues Alex Chadwick and Madeleine Brand, she has anchored live breaking news coverage of Benazir Bhutto's assassination and the Minneapolis bridge collapse. She's interviewed Nobel Laureates, members of Congress, Grammy-winner Lucinda Williams and some people you may not have heard of, like the inventor of scratch-n-sniff wallpaper and David Depto (U.S. champion of the new intellectual and brutal sport of chess boxing.)

There is little Cohen won't do for Day to Day listeners. She's braved the the war zone of the "All You Can Eat" seats at Dodger Stadium. She played countless hours of Guitar Hero II to get audio from the game's last level — Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird." And she grooved to the Beach Boys while drinking several varieties of Chardonnay to test a theory about the effect of music on wine. (It was worth it: The piece wound up being one of NPR's Most E-mailed Stories.)

Cohen started her career at NPR as an intern with Weekend Edition Sunday, where she also launched the first-ever "Intern Edition." Since then, she has worked just about every angle radio has to offer. She's been a bureau chief, show host, newscast anchor, director, producer and editor at member station KQED, at NPR and for the American Public Media programs Marketplace and Weekend America.

She graduated from Brown University where she studied Eastern Religions and went on to get her Masters of Journalism at the University of Berkeley at California. Cohen has won awards from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

She lives in the LA neighborhood of Atwater Village with her husband Rich and their two dogs Buddy and Bosco. When not making radio, Alex plays banked track roller derby under the nom de guerre Axles of Evil.

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