The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee has returned a “qualified admonition” of Illinois Sen. Roland Burris for his contacts with disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich before Blago appointed Burris to Barack Obama’s vacant Senate. The ethics committee basically said Burris did unethical things but not clearly illegal ones.

For a while, Burris was a national embarrassment, with even Illinois’s other senator, Dick Durbin, calling for him to resign. Now he’s just extremely powerless. In essence, Illinois, the 5th most populous state in the country, has about 1.5 representatives in the upper chamber. The presidential election of Obama was supposed to lead to more people looking out for Illinois in Washington. But it might be more damaging to the state to have only one Senator respected and listened to by their colleagues. Where is Burris, for example, on the big national-state issue of moving Guantanamo detainees to an Illinois prison? He’s nowhere, of course, because no one cares what he says.

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