At a time when we remain mired in two unnecessary wars, when our military budget consumes enough of our resources to provide healthcare for all, when our economy is cratering and Americans are facing unemployment and economic ruin, we have a Senate committee ready to take on one of the more important issues of the day: the college bowl system.
You’re kidding me, right?
I know this is supposed to be good news, but really — Al Franken? I guess he was better than the alternative, but he is no Paul Wellstone.
It’s time we change the way we fill vacant U.S. Senate seats.
The sturm and drang surrounding the vacancies in Illinois and New York, the initial attempt to replace Sen. (now Vice President) Joe Biden with his son, and the surprising choice of an unknown in Colorado to replace Ken Salazar, should not be viewed as isolated instances, but as examples of a systemic problem that needs to be addressed.
Basically, we should fill vacant seats in the Senate the same way we do in the House — via special election.
John Nichols, a columnist for The Nation, makes that point as part of a larger blog entry on Caroline Kennedy taking her name out of contention for the New York seat.
The speculation game will go into overdrive now that Kennedy has quit, and every prospect will be analyzed not with regard to his or her potential contributions to the Congress but with regard to his or her potential benefits for Paterson.
That’s what is wrong with allowing senators to be appointed by governors. If political and personal considerations by governors may not always be Rod Blagojevich ugly, but they are always ugly.
Governors appoint senators with an eye toward helping themselves and their friends. And the appointed senators become frontrunners for vacant seats. From a small “d” democracy standpoint, the process is doubly compromised.
None of this is new and none of this should be surprising. It was just three years ago that newly elected Gov. Jon Corzine appointed Bob Menendez to the Senate seat Corzine was vacating — a move designed to shore up his standing with the Latino community, but also because he viewed Menendez as the stronger fundraiser and the best chance to keep the seat in the capital “D” column.
Menendez has done an admirable job in the Senate, but there is no denying that his appointment was about politics. Winning the appointment cleared the field for him in the primary and kept the party together, which generally means a Democratic win these days in state races. (Memo to Chris Christie: Regardless of the polling, you face the steepest of uphill battles trying to unseat an incumbent Democrat in New Jersey).
What are the alternatives? We could let the state legislatures make the appointment, but that is no better than having a governor handle it — and it contradicts the 17th amendment, which ended the original practice of having the legislatures pick senators in favor of direct election.
The best solution, of course, is to hold a special election. But don’t expect the people in the state capitals to back that one — they like their power and they will offer an array of excuses for opposing it.
Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake explains the hypocrisy of Harry Reid’s — and the Democrats’ — hardline stance on Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat.
(T)he decisions Reid is making right now are politically motivated, with little regard for the law. The Democrats are only in this position, and looking so compromised, because of bad decisions Reid has made in the past.
How will it look if the Sergent at Arms bars Burris from the Senate floor, but did nothing to Harriet Miers and Karl Rove when they defied Senate subpoenas?
How will it look if they refuse to accept Burris into the Democratic Caucus after having accepted Joe Lieberman, who spent years enabling Bush administration crime and corruption as Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee?
How does it look to be screaming about Burris’s “taint” when they did nothing for decades about Ted Stevens, and gave him a standing ovation even after he’d been convicted? Or for that matter, their inaction with regard to Larry Craig?
How does it look now that Reid is manipulating Senate procedure to exclude Burris, but simply shrugged his shoulders over Samuel Alito, warrantless wiretapping and the Military Commissions Act?
How does it look? Hypocritical and overly political.
Anyone looking for an example as to why newspapers should not endorse in primaries should read today’s New Yok Times’ endorsements of Richard Zimmer and Frank Lautenberg for the Republican and Democratic Senate nominations in New Jersey.
The Lautenberg endorsement is the stronger of the two — telegraphing the paper’s likely endorsement of the four-term incumbent in the fall, provided he gets past U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews on Tuesday. He gets significantly more space and a far more glowing review of his accomplishments and goals, most of which dovetail with positions taken by the Times in the recent past.
The Zimmer endorsement, on the other hand, reads like one written to satisfy a requirement. Much less real estate is given to the GOP race (the Senate and a House race share space) and while he is lauded for being in the model of past New Jersey moderates, the Times gives a perfunctory nod to his positions on the Bush tax cuts and a balanced budget, calling it a “goal (that) would be impossible to attain without a quick and drastic curtailment of the Iraq war effort, and while Mr. Zimmer wants to withdraw combat troops, he opposes setting a deadline.” Basically, Zimmer and the Times agree on very little and Zimmer wins this endorsement by default.
As a reader — and an editorial writer — I find the approach disingenuous. As I said, the GOP candidate has little chance of winning the paper’s backing in the fall, so why bother with this excercise? If it is only to preserve some false sense of balance — creating an illusion that the November endorsement is up for grabs — then I’d drop the pretense. Better to not endorse in the primaries than to engage in an intellectually dishonest excercise.
Hank Kalet 
