Tag Archives: obama

U.S. Senate Vacancies

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Vacant U.S. Senate seats are in the news lately. Obama, Biden, and Clinton are all leaving office; Illinois legislators are talking about passing a law to prevent Gov. Blagojevich from appointing Obama’s replacement; and if Ted Stevens had been re-elected, he might have been expelled, leaving a vacancy to be filled.

It all got me wondering why there’s no uniform method for filling a vacancy. Each state has its own law for replacing a senator; most states require the governor to appoint a replacement, but some states limit that power, requiring the replacement to be from the same party as the vacater and/or requiring the governor to choose from a short list. And some states don’t let the governor make the appointment at all, requiring a special election instead. This leads to lots of confusion; for example, many people thought that Sarah Palin could have appointed herself to replace Ted Stevens if he was expelled, but it turns out that Alaska requires a special election to fill a vacant seat.

So where did this craziness come from, especially given that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that states aren’t allowed to set term limits for their U.S. senators?

Well, I did some googling and it turns out that it comes from the Seventeenth Amendment. This is commonly known as the amendment that required U.S. senators to be elected by the people instead of being chosen by state legislatures. But the amendment’s second paragraph states:

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of each State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

So, although the people must eventually vote in special elections to fill Senate vacancies, state legislatures can empower the governor to fill those vacancies temporarily. Hence, state-by-state differences in how the process unfolds.

This has been another episode of “Answers to Questions You Didn’t Ask.”

(P.S. Here are all the state statutes and relevant federal statutes and constitutional clauses. Found here.)

On the Obama Inauguration

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How glitzy shoud Obama’s inauguration be? How much money should be spent? The New York Times provides historical perspective:

The most elaborate presidential inaugural parade took place during one of the nation’s biggest economic expansions. In 1953, in the postwar boom, the newly sworn-in president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, led a parade up Pennsylvania Avenue with 73 bands, 59 floats, 350 horses, 3 elephants, an Alaskan dog team and military vehicles. There were 25,000 marchers on foot; the entire parade lasted four and a half hours. It was deemed so excessive that subsequent parades were limited to 15,000 marchers.

Perhaps the most austere inauguration was in 1945, when the nation was still at war and Franklin D. Roosevelt, beginning his fourth term, was in failing health. There was no parade; he took the oath on the South Portico of the White House in a ceremony that lasted just 14 minutes. He wanted chicken a la king to be served for lunch to his guests, but his housekeeper said she could not keep it hot, and instead served cold chicken salad, rolls, coffee and cake, unfrosted. Wartime rationing meant no butter for the rolls.

It is safe to say that Mr. Obama’s inauguration will fall somewhere in between.

Solidarity Obama

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Whenever I hear the phrase “President-elect Obama” I immediately set it to the tune of the words “Solidarity Forever” from Billy Eliot.

Instead of

Solidarity solidarity
Solidarity forever

I sing

President-elect President-elect
President-elect Obama

I just can’t stop.

(You can hear the original in this clip at about 1:59 and several times thereafter.)

It’s like eight years ago, when W picked Dick Cheney as his running mate and people were going around replacing the words “Slim Shady” with “Dick Cheney” in the Eminem song.