The fiasco that is the Roland Burris Senate appointment continued today. One day after proclaiming that the Lord had mandated his seating in the Senate, Burris gave what the Times termed a "defiant" press conference, asserting, “This is all politics and theater, but I am the junior senator according to every law book in the nation.”

Perhaps not “every law book.” Most commentary about the appointment has focused on the 1969 Powell v. McCormack decision, in which the Supreme Court overturned the House of Representatives’ attempt to deny Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell his seat. Yet there’s good reason to believe that the Powell precedent isn’t as clearcut as some astute legal commentators have claimed.

The most appropriate Senate precedent is not Powell but a 1920s case involving political corruption. The 1926 Pennsylvania Senate race featured three of the state’s towering political figures from the post-World War I era: Governor Gifford Pinchot, a progressive Republican; Congressman William Vare, head of the Philadelphia GOP machine; and William Wilson, who served as Secretary of Labor under Woodrow Wilson.

After incumbent Republican George Pepper announced his retirement, Vare and Pinchot faced each other in the GOP primary. Vare won comfortably, but Pinchot charged that the congressman had committed election fraud and had violated the state’s anti-corruption statutes by spending excessively on his campaign. The fall battle became a cause célèbre for progressives, who strongly backed Wilson. But pre-Depression Pennsylvania was solidly Republican, and Vare narrowly prevailed.

Democrats and progressive Republicans scored strong gains in the 1926 elections, enough to have a working majority in the upper chamber. Though no criminal charges were ever filed against Vare, the Senate declined to seat him. Instead, it referred the case to the Rules Committee, which conducted an investigation that spanned more than two years. The conclusion? Vare’s campaign was guilty of corruption, though not to such an extent that the Senate could say that Wilson would have won a fair election. So the Senate decided to seat neither Vare nor Wilson. The governor appointed Joseph Grundy to the seat until a special election could be held for the remainder of what would have been Vare’s term.

The Vare case, in short, suggested that the Senate could deny a seat to someone whose election (or, to extend the precedent to the case of Burris, appointment) a majority of the chamber deemed corrupt, even if not criminally corrupt.

It’s possible, of course, that in the post-Powell legal environment, the Senate’s decision not to seat Vare would have been deemed unconstitutional. But that question hasn’t really been tested, and it’s unlikely that Harry Reid will make the same mistakes that the House did in the 1960s with Powell—namely voting to expel without any investigation.

That Reid has already announced the Burris appointment will be referred to the Rules Committee means that we may be hearing more of the Vare precedent in coming weeks.