Senate News

With Ted Kennedy's death, seven seats in the United States Senate have been or soon will be opened since the last election, mainly in the form of resignations. This is the highest number in sixty years. Some, like President Obama's seat, are scheduled to be filled by election according to the calendar already, but four of them will be require special elections. The Massachusetts seat requires one by January.

The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913, turned the power to elect U.S. Senators over from state legislatures to the people. Before that, Senate candidates campaigned to get their would-be constituents to vote for their party's state legislative candidates. (It turns out that, had direct election by the people existed in 1858, Abraham Lincoln might have been elected to the Senate; although Stephen Douglas won re-election because the Democrats narrowly held on to control of the Illinois legislature, the Republicans actually won the popular vote.) Before 1913, governors always appointed people to fill the remainder of unexpired U.S. Senate terms; now special elections are constitutionally required, though the states are given the power to set them up and decide how to do so.

Massachusetts had allowed governors to make interim appointments before a Senate election, but the state changed the law in 2004 and barred the governor from doing so when it became likely that John Kerry would be elected President and Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, could appoint his interim replacement. Homophobes in Ohio and a videotape from a terrorist leader in a cave ruined Kerry's chances, but the law remained in effect. No one ever expected Ted Kennedy to die in office. Also, no one probably expected the Democrats to actually elect another governor in Massachusetts! (Deval Patrick was, in 2006, the first Democrat elected governor there in twenty years.)

So now Bay Staters have an empty Senate seat and Democrats are short a sixtieth vote in the middle of the health care reform debate- which is why Kennedy wrote to have that law changed, as previously noted here. In the meantime, there are in Congress bipartisan - yes, bipartisan - efforts to pass a constitutional amendment requiring and dictating the terms of special elections to be held in all cases of Senate vacancies, taking away that right from the states. Considering the unintended consequences of the situation in Massachusetts, that might not be a bad thing.