What do Illinois Gov. Ron Blagojevich and the voters of Utah have in common? Both have been dissed by the United States Senate.

Commentators last week said that the Senate's refusal to seat Governor Blago's appointee, Roland Burris, is unprecedented. They are wrong. There was a precedent set with our very own Utah Sen. Reed Smoot 100 years ago.

Smoot, a Republican, had been fairly elected to the office by the will of the people of Utah in 1902. When he arrived in Washington to take his Senate seat, that august body whipped it out from under him.

In Burris' case, the Senate defended its action last week by pointing out that his papers were not in order. With Smoot, it was different. He was not the pick of a corrupt governor, but the winner of a free and fair election. There was, however, a problem.

Reed Smoot was an Apostle, one of the 12 elite men who, along with the First Presidency, runs The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smoot came from, by Mormon standards anyway, an old and aristocratic family. Coming from such stock, his appointment to the Quorum of the Twelve in 1900 was in line with common church practice. In and of itself that shouldn't have been an issue to the U.S. Senate -- plenty of their number have had ecclesiastical backgrounds.

But there were those nagging rumors, stoked by The Salt Lake Tribune , that the LDS Church was cheating on its 1890 promise to abandon polygamy. In fact, high church officials had been solemnizing plural marriages behind Washington's back.

Smoot may have been ignorant of the fact, and he himself had only one wife. Nonetheless, he held high rank in the church and if the church was up to shenanigans, then he had some explaining to do.

A Senate committee set about getting to the bottom of things. Besides the polygamy issue, it emerged that Mormons took an oath of vengeance against the United States in their temple ceremony.

The church had to abase itself before Caesar to secure Smoot his coveted seat.

The aging church president, Joseph F. Smith, went to Washington to be grilled in public by hostile politicians. He and other church officials had to swear over and over that, no, the church was not sanctioning plural marriages and, yes, Mormons were good, patriotic Americans. The church had to prove it by surrendering up a transcript of the temple ceremony.

After a five-year investigation a majority of the committee voted to remove Smoot from office, but the full Senate ignored the recommendation and allowed the senator from Utah to take his seat. He was to remain for 25 years, pushing pro-business and "values" legislation (one of his proudest achievements was banning James Joyce's Ulysses from our shores).

In the end, Smoot grew to be a powerful player in Washington; in 1923, he become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Interest in his ecclesiastical duties back in Salt Lake, however, never seemed to burn too hot. He is remembered best for a piece of misguided legislation that deepened the severity of the Great Depression.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed in 1930, was meant to protect American business but ended up killing trade and drawing out the bad times. Smoot was defeated by Democrat Elbert D. Thomas in 1932.

Pat Bagley is the editorial cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune and author of Bagley's Utah Survival Guide.