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.Somehow "may [if there's an emergency that requires the presence of a second senator from the state] empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments" has come to mean "the governor shall appoint for the remainder of the term" but I'm darned if I know why.
Seems to me that the amendment should be interpreted to give the governor power to appoint a replacement for, maybe, "a term of 3 months, at which time a special election will be held."
4 comments:
If that's a sadness, I think that the greater sadness is that the Senate, that has been controlled for the last two years by the Democrats, and now has a Democratic President-elect, blathered that there was no way the appointee was going to be seated in their Senate.....then the next day they were kissing the guy's ass.
What's my point ? My point is that the Republicans have no monopoly on sleeze. The Democrats have shown since they assumed the leadership of the House and the Senate that they do not have the testicles to accomplich anything of consequence.
Jack
Well I agree with you. But I do have to say, that Bush and Dick and most of their cabinet, now and was, has got to be the biggest sleeze of all. I hope the history books will tell it all.
mary ellen
PRESSURE'S ON.... George W. Bush's two terms haven't been successful, but they have been eventful. The president has faced daunting challenges and striking crises, some of his own making.
And given what we've seen, statements like these are just painful.
Asked by People magazine what moments from the last eight years he revisited most often, W. talked passionately about the pitch he threw out at the World Series in 2001: "I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough."
Specifically, People asked, "Which moments from the last eight years do you revisit most often?" Bush, after talking about meeting with families of fallen soldiers, replied, "I think about throwing out that pitch at the World Series on [Oct. 30] 2001. My heart was racing when I got to the mound. Didn't want to bounce it. Didn't want to let the fans down. My heart was pumping so hard, I wasn't sure if I could lift my arm. I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough."
"Curiously enough." Bush knows it's a bizarre thing to say, but in this case, he was simply telling the truth -- when he reflects on his presidency, the real anxiety came when he had to throw a baseball 60 feet.
Not on Sept. 11, not when sending troops into Iraq, not when he was told we might lose an American city to a hurricane. Not when the economy collapsed, not when anthrax starting killing people through the mail, not when he was told about what had happened at Abu Ghraib, not in the midst of crises in Israel, Afghanistan, Georgia, India, North Korea, or Pakistan.
There are a lot of things I'm not going to miss about Bush's presidency, but these head-shaking comments are certainly high on the list.
NO MORE BUSH TO KICK AROUND....James Fallows on the Bush press conference earlier today:
I think even people who oppose the Bush Administrations policies would find it somewhat harder to dislike him viscerally after this performance — rather than getting angrier the more they see him, as with most of his appearances over these last eight years....Everything in his posture, expression, and body language — even his emphasis on the word defeat in talking about the 2008 results — indicated that he has taken in the fact that things have not gone well.
I haven't yet watched the press conference myself, so all I can say is: I sure hope Fallows is wrong. It's human nature, of course, for anger over a botched job to recede with time, and perhaps it's also true that anger naturally morphs into other, more complex emotions anyway. How many people today are really angry at Herbert Hoover?
Still, I sure hope that the public doesn't forgive Bush for a very, very long time. To this day I don't understand how such a manifestly unqualified candidate got either nominated or elected in the first place, and the damage this man-child has done to the country during his eight years in office is hard to even put into words. If Barack Obama is lucky, he might — might — by 2016 be able to get us back to where we were in 2000. The last eight years have taken us backward by almost every metric that matters, and as he heads off to Texas, hopefully never to be heard from again, Bush will go down in history as one of the very few presidents to have left the country in demonstrably worse shape than when he got it. It's an elite group indeed.
Post a Comment