Choosing a senator

With the number of senators moving into the executive branch we're seeing governors across the land getting an opportunity to choose the new senators. John Fund writes about the quandary facing Governor Paterson of New York. Should he pick Caroline Kennedy whose main qualification is her last name now that she's dropped the Schlossberg which doesn't quite evoke the fairy tale or should he pick Andrew Cuomo and get Cuomo out of the way for Paterson's own primary battle in 2010.

Mr. Paterson is himself a governor who happened into his job by accident after the spectacular fall of Eliot Spitzer. With a slowing economy, the prospect of massive tax increases and a volatile group of special interests making demands on the state's budget, his job in winning a full term in his own right won't be easy.

That's why the safest choice for Mr. Paterson might be to appoint state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who has been viewed as a possible primary challenger to the governor in 2010. Promoting Mr. Cuomo would remove the largest single obstacle to Mr. Paterson's election to the office he now holds, but it might also irritate women voters who were used to having Mrs. Clinton represent New York in the nation's capital.

It's time to amend the 17th Amendment which gives the governors of a state the power to appoint a new senator unless the state legislature chooses otherwise. Why shouldn't we have special elections to fill those vacant senatorial seats? We do that for vacant House seats. States could set up an election with a short time frame and let the people choose their next senator. At least before the 17th Amendment, state legislatures picked the senators. But now it is all down to the choice of one person. So we have the sight of Frank Murkowski picking his own daughter or Delaware Governor Minner picking a placeholder to hold Biden's seat for his son. And now we have Rod Blagojevich trying to sell his choice to replace Obama and Paterson being lobbied to pick a woman whose main qualification is that she comes from a famous family and wants to skip all the mess that would be involved in actually asking voters on her own for their support.

And while there is no indication that Paterson is being offered bribes such as Blagojevich was soliciting for making his choice, does anyone doubt that he would benefit from the Kennedy support in his reelection bid? The quid pro quos don't have to be explicit, but they exist nonetheless.

In Illinois we have the Democrats blocking a new election for senator because they're afraid that a Republican might actually have a chance to win a seat from voters disgusted by seeing the corruption revealed up and down the line among the state's Democratic politicians. The Democrats want to rush through some sort of method of booting the cretinous Blagojevich out of there so that his replacement could name a Democrat to the Obama seat. They even tried a ludicrous attempt to say that a part of the state constitution crafted to address the problem of a physically disabled governor by claiming that being ethically disabled was the same thing. The Illinois Supreme Court quashed that sad attempt by refusing to hear the case.

Let's stop all this silliness and let people vote on Senate replacements. Joshua Spivak in the Washington Post editorializes today against special elections due to the expense and time involved plus the concern that turnout would be low and so the more extreme and committed voters would be selecting the replacement senator. He also worries that, with the lack of a primary, parties may have too much of say in choosing candidates. But still we would have voters choosing the new senator and give that senator more legitimacy than being the pick of just a single person. And the parties obviously have a role when a governor picks a replacement. We'd avoid the situations when a governor of a different party from the senator being replaced picks someone from his own party to fill the seat as Democratic Governor Barnes of Georgia did when Republican Paul Coverdell died and Barnes chose a Democrat, Zell Miller, to replace the Republican. Zell Miller was popular enough in Georgia to have probably won the seat in a special election on his own. He did so two years later and should have had to in the first place. So the argument that parties would have too big a role in such special elections really doesn't hold up given the role that partisan politics plays now in such choices.

Whatever the drawbacks of a special election, it's better to let the people vote than to have the smarmy sort of politics that we witness now.