In their GOP conference meeting today, Senate Republicans punted “on the thorniest question – whether to formally expel Sen. Ted Stevens from their ranks.” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) had planned to offer a resolution that read:

Resolved that Sen. Ted Stevens not be invited to future Republican Conferences, and that committee assignments shall not be assigned him by the Republican Conference.

“After talking with many of my colleagues, it’s clear there are sufficient votes to pass the resolution regarding Senator Stevens,” DeMint said in a statement released shortly after the 9:30 conference meeting began. But the GOP delayed the vote on Stevens today, pending the resolution of the Alaska recount.

Soon after a jury convicted Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) on seven felony charges, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) called on Stevens to resign from the U.S. Senate. “Alaskans are grateful for his decades of public service but the time has come for him to step aside,” she said in a statement. But days later, when asked if she would vote for Stevens, Palin refused to answer. Now, Palin is backtracking on whether Stevens should resign:

Asked Wednesday whether she still believed that Mr. Stevens should resign, Ms. Palin was circumspect, saying only that the people of Alaska “just spoke” on the issue at the ballot box and that “they want him as their senator.” She said Mr. Stevens should decide “what happens next.” (Mr. Stevens could still be forced to step down, and Ms. Palin is widely viewed as a potential candidate for his seat if he does.)

The Anchorage Daily News reports that the “Alaska Bar Association went to the state Supreme Court on Thursday seeking to suspend Sen. Ted Stevens’ law license on an interim basis, pending completion of his appeals. … Any final decision on Stevens’ license would wait until his appeals have been finished.” Unlike voting rights, which say that a felony conviction is effective only upon sentencing, bar association rules say that a conviction is set as soon as a jury rules.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called last night for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) to resign his seat in the Senate. The Lexington Herald-Leader reports:

“I think he should resign immediately,” McConnell, Kentucky’s senior senator, told the Herald-Leader Tuesday night after a Hardin County GOP rally. “If he did not do that … there is a 100 percent certainty that he would be expelled from the Senate.” … “The Senate would have zero tolerance for the continued service of a convicted felon,” McConnell said.

In calling for Stevens’s resignation, McConnell joins several other prominent Republican senators including Jim DeMint (SC), Lindsey Graham (SC), John McCain (AZ), Gordon Smith (OR), and Norm Coleman (MN). Other Republican senators, including Pat Roberts (KS) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), have suggested that “it’s up to Alaskans to decide Stevens’ fate.” Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) also called for Stevens to resign.

In today’s White House press briefing, Dana Perino said the White House would “decline to comment” on the recent conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and whether he should resign:

Q: Sen. McCain today said Sen. Stevens should resign. Does the President believe Sen. Stevens should resign?

PERINO: Well given that Sen. Stevens has said that he’s going to fight his conviction and that he’s going to appeal, and that is his right to do, since it’s going to be a matter of ongoing litigation, we’ll decline to comment for now.

Watch it:

After Stevens was indicted, Bush attended an event in Alaska alongside Stevens. “The United States military has had no better support and stronger friend than Sen. Ted Stevens. Thank you for coming, Senator,” Bush said in August.

Yesterday, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), the longest-serving Republican senator in history, was found guilty on all seven counts for failing to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts on his Senate disclosure forms. The story got heavy airtime on MSNBC and CNN’s prime-time programs, with Campbell Brown and Rachel Maddow each devoting multiple segments to the story. Notably silent on the issue, however, were Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, neither of whom discussed the senator’s case at all during their prime-time shows last night.

Reacting to the conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), Rep. Don Young (R-AK) repeatedly insisted that the trial was invalid because “there’s no way this is a jury of his peers.” Young may have been alluding to the fact that the jury was comprised mostly of African Americans, though he later declared his objection to the jury because they were D.C. residents who had an automatic bias against members of Congress:

You have to understand that this was not a jury of his peers. It was in Washington, D.C. , which most people in Washington, D.C., don’t look very favorably on the Congress because we run them. I don’t know why anybody didn’t bring that out. They’re not a self-governing city like they say they are. We actually make decisions for them. Makes us very, very suspicious.

Of course, no one in D.C. would claim to be a self-governing city; that’s why obtaining a full-voting congressional representative is so important. However, House and Senate conservatives — including both Young and Stevens — have blocked measures affording D.C. residents full representation.

Yesterday, after Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) was found guilty by a federal jury for failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and services he had received from friends, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin issued a statement calling it “a sad day for Alaska.” In the statement, Palin also declared that the “verdict shines a light though on the corrupting influence of the big oil service company” whose CEO provided many of Stevens’ unreported gifts:

The verdict shines a light though on the corrupting influence of the big oil service company up there in Alaska that was allowed to control too much of our state. And that control was part of the culture of corruption that I was elected to fight. And that fight must always move forward regardless of party affiliation or seniority or even past service.

Palin’s statement neglects to mention that she also has ties to “the big oil service company,” Veco. When she ran for lieutenant governor in 2002, “she gathered $5,000 — or about 10 percent of her campaign fund — from Veco officials or their wives,” including $500 from CEO Bill Allen.

In 2006, when she ran for governor, Palin ran as a critic of Veco and said that she “didn’t want Veco money.” But her running mate, Sean Parnell, received two $500 checks from Veco officers during the campaign, including one from Allen. Last month, Palin donated to charity “more than $1,000 in campaign contributions from two Alaska politicians implicated” in the federal corruption probe surrounding Veco.

Palin had accepted the donations from the state legislators, John Cowdery and Bruce Weyhrauch, after their offices were searched by the FBI in 2006. Palin made the charitable donations only after the AP had reported that she accepted the money in 2006.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) today called for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) to step down after yesterday’s conviction on seven felony counts:

Yesterday, Senator Ted Stevens was found guilty of corruption. It is a sign of the health of our democracy that the people continue to hold their representatives to account for improper or illegal conduct, but this verdict is also a sign of the corruption and insider-dealing that has become so pervasive in our nation’s capital.

It is clear that Senator Stevens has broken his trust with the people and that he should now step down. I hope that my colleagues in the Senate will be spurred by these events to redouble their efforts to end this kind of corruption once and for all.

Until now, McCain has largely refused to condemn the Senate’s longest-serving Republican. In July, Stevens appeared at a campaign event with McCain, who did not mention Stevens’s legal troubles. The McCain campaign even put out a statement saying that Stevens was “entitled to the presumption of innocence.”