Politics As Usual Is That Unusual

Each one was appointed by the governor of his state to temporarily fill a vacancy created by another occurrence, in this case, the death of Sen. Kennedy. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-WI., has been elected three times by the people of Wisconsin, and he says ‘people shouldn’t be voting in the United States Senate unless they were elected by the people of their state.

” He’s obviously entitled to his opinion on this matter, but he’s also well aware of the existing law on the books pertaining to it. Feingold wants to amend the Constitution so that all Senate vacancies are filled by special elections rather than by gubernatorial appointments. But until that happens, the 17th Amendment allows states to let their governors appoint replacements — and that means that Roland Burris (D-Ill.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), George LeMieux (R-Fla.) and, soon, Paul Kirk will be representing constituents who never had a chance to vote for or against them. Whether it has to do with closeness or admiration or political considerations, the idea that one person gets to decide rather than all the people in the state bothers me,” Feingold said.

Like many other issues in Washington, to change the process is more easily said, than done. And Russ Feingold is not the only one upset about the swarm of unelected members. “It’s a problem,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), No. 3 in Republican leadership, said of caretakers in particular. “The temporary nature of this is causing me to rethink the whole process. ... The large number of temporary appointments is raising the question that we ought to deal with it one way or another — either the states should or we should.” Of course, Alexander has a reason to complain: Of the six — counting Kirk — unelected members of the current Senate, five are Democrats, appointed by Democratic governors. And for party leaders, caretakers — or appointed senators who don’t run in the next election — can be loyal votes, following party orthodoxy since they don’t have to worry about carving out a unique image ahead of a political campaign back home.

Other than Gillibrand and Bennet, the rest of the appointees are not running for election next year. Each of the so called ‘caretaker senators’ has been voting at a very high percentage, about 95% of the time, along their party line. This actually may be the thing that bothers Republican senators the most. They want ‘all’ the democratic senators to have to go through the same electoral process and spend the time and money to get elected that they themselves had to in order to become a senator.

In their view, it doesn’t seem fair that one single person, a sitting democratic governor, can just appoint another democrat to fill a vacancy when he seat opens up, until the next election (or a special election is held, as in Massachusetts’ case), thus helping to keep firm control of the senate in the hands of the democrats. In the end, it always seems to come down to a matter of politics. I strongly suspect that, if the circumstances were reversed, and five of the six temporary caretakers were republicans, and they were the majority party, then the democrats in the senate would be singing the same tune. From my standpoint, I have to admit that it seems to be a matter of politics as usual in both Massachusetts as well as Washington DC. so nobody should be surprised.

By: Frank Bilotta

By: Frank R. Bilotta

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