Jeff Jacoby has a great article up at the Boston Globe indicating that Ted Kennedy should resign his seat in the Senate.
Kennedy is asking the Massachusetts legislature to pass a bill that allows the Governor to appoint Senators should their seats become vacant. This is very convenient since Kennedy’s seat will be vacant when he eventually succumbs to his terminal brain cancer.
However, Kennedy is the reason that the Governor cannot appoint successors. When Romney, a Republican, was Governor and John Kerry was running for the presidency Ted Kennedy asked the legislature to pass a bill requiring a special election in the event of a Senate vacancy. He did this to prevent Romney from being able to appoint a Republican to the seat, should Kerry have won. Ted Kennedy was instrumental in having the rules changed from what he now wants them to be.
You see, there is now a Democrat in the State House and Kennedy is using this lame excuse of saying people of Massachusetts deserve to have two votes in the Senate and the delay of a special election will keep them from having just that.
Too fricking bad.
Kennedy was not worried about having two votes when he asked for the law to be changed last time. He was only concerned about keeping the seat in the hands of the Democrats. I understand the partisan politics but let’s not pretend that this is all about having two votes for the state because it is not.
As Jacoby points out, Kennedy has missed all but a handful of Senate votes this year so Massachusetts does not have two votes even with the seat occupied.
Jacoby goes on to point out that if Kennedy is really concerned about the two votes he should resign so that he can be replaced and put the second vote back in the Senate.
For well over a year, Massachusetts has not had the “two voices . . . and two votes in the Senate’’ that Kennedy says its voters are entitled to. Sickness has kept him away from Capitol Hill for most of the last 15 months. He has missed all but a handful of the 270 roll-calls taken in the Senate so far this year. Through no fault of his own, he is unable to carry out the job he was reelected to in 2006. As a matter of integrity, he should bow out and allow his constituents to choose a replacement. Boston Globe
The problem with this thinking is that Jacoby indicates that Kennedy should step down “as a matter of integrity.”
Ted Kennedy had NO integrity. If he did he would not try to push for changes to the law that circumvent the democratic process of allowing the people to put a person in office. If Kennedy had integrity he would have resigned after his diagnosis and an election would have already taken place.
Kennedy has a career that is nothing but a lack of integrity.
Of course this would be a moot point if the Constitution had not been changed. Senators were appointed by state legislatures until the Constitution was amended.
That was a mistake.
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