So it appears that Massachusetts has (re)changed its rules about Senate appointments to allow the seating of an interim replacement for Ted Kennedy. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is a crassly political move steeped in hypocrisy. After all, they only changed the rules in 2004 to prevent the governor at the time (Romney) from being able to appoint a Republican during the interim period.
So I can sympathize with this sort of attitude:
I’m not sure why they didn’t avoid this problem for the future by drafting it as “Democratic Party governors shall have the power to appoint replacements to the Senate, Republican governors shall not.” Surely that represents the will of the people better…
Still, it’s not really the same is it? The consistent theme in both of these cases is that the Massachusetts legislature wanted to ensure that the public would continue to receive the kind of representation that they had voted for. Romney appointing a temporary Republican sure doesn’t FEEL very democratic (small d) does it? And similarly, it would be macabre and depressing were health care reform to either fail to pass or be extremely watered down solely because Ted Kennedy died at an inopportune moment.
The people of Massachusetts voted for someone who made fixing our health care disaster one of his primary goals for his life. To deny them the chance to help make that a reality would be tragic and unfair.
So yeah, I’m okay with the appointment, even while recognizing that it’s an unfortunate process that surrounds it. All of which merely suggests that we really ought to do something to formalize this process so it can be taken out of the hands of political operatives all around. Perhaps a law that the person tapped may not run in the next election and must be selected from within the same party as the one who died.