This morning the Massachusetts Legislature will find itself facing a dying man's request: that they craft a bill allowing the Governor to appoint an interim Senator to fill the seat just vacated by the late, great Edward Kennedy - over the objections of the GOP who are screaming "Hypocrisy!"
The MA State Dems, of course, passed the law previously ('04) that took the power from the Governor to fill a Senate vacancy, handing it (appropriately) to a vote of the people, and an appointed Senator has a leg up on everyone else who might be in the chase, so the GOP has at least a partial point, depending on who the Governor were to appoint (assuming such a bill were to be passed, which it probably will be).
I have a suggestion for that Legislature to stem the controversy and to, more importantly, provide a possible national template for the fast and fair filling of Senate vacancies.
This idea came from a discussion I had with my wife after listening to a newscast about the issue last week, just after the Senator's death. She said, rightly, that even an interim appointment would, de-facto, undercut the upcoming election process by giving the appointee the aforementioned leg up.
"Well," I argued, "Teddy is certainly right that the people of that state (or any state for that matter) deserve their whole Senatorial representation at all times, and especially at this critical juncture in our history. But I see your point..." And that got me thinking.
The solution occurred to me pretty quickly: the Legislature should include two limiting factors to the Governor's interim appointment: the appointee could not be a candidate in the subsequent special election (ie, he or she would be a true interim appointee) and the appointee must be selected from the ranks of the outgoing Senator's party (to further separate the Governor - no matter his party affiliation - from access to a national-game-changing power move).
Let's discuss it, shall we?
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UPDATE: Several posters have noted that the first half of this proposal is a form of term limits and, as such, is unconstitutional. In my discussion with cph about this, I came up with this language to address that issue:
The interim appointee whom the Governor shall choose shall have executed a pledge in writing to abstain from running in the special election pursuant to his or her appointment.
This is actually an idea that Gov Patrick has floated (the pledge) but not as a part of the bill, to my knowledge. This codifies the pledge which takes the issue out of term limits and into contract law, I believe.
Thanks for the discussion, everyone. At any rate, I've sent the diary link to the appropriate MA legislative folks and to the Gov.