The people should choose senators, too

Writing in this space last week, I supported retaining secret ballots in union elections because that is the way we do things in this democracy, when electing “everyone from a tree warden to president of the United States.â€

Well, not quite. We do elect tree wardens and presidents, justices of the peace and governors and representatives and senators — but not always senators. When there is a vacancy in the United States Senate due to the resignation or death of a senator, the governor of this state and 43 others appoints the senator’s successor. When there’s a House vacancy, it’s filled by a special election, and the people vote.

The governor’s Senate appointee serves until the next federal election, so it is possible for him or her to have a pretty long run. If, as a purely hypothetical example, President Barak Obama had rewarded Chris Dodd by naming him ambassador to Ireland last January, his successor, named by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, would have served until the November election in 2010, about two years.

Rell would have undoubtedly named a senator from her own party, possibly someone who had recently lost his House seat, like Rob Simmons or Chris Shays, giving her appointee a nice head start before he had to run for a six-year term. This would have also have given Connecticut’s Republican Party, with 24 percent of the state’s registered voters, the first senator to call its own since Lowell Weicker was last elected in 1982. That’s 27 years, if you’re counting.

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Then, to further illustrate the mischief a governor can do with a Senate vacancy, there’s the stuff, from laughable to terrible stuff, that happened when several senators went on to better jobs after the most recent presidential election:

The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, was arrested for trying to sell the seat left vacant by Sen. Obama when the senator resigned to become president. How’s that for an argument against governors’ filling vacancies?

The weak and accidental governor of New York, David Patterson, after dithering over naming Caroline Kennedy to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chose an obscure congresswoman from upstate whose only qualification seems to be her ability to help Patterson geographically when he runs in 2010.

And in Delaware, Democratic Gov. Ruth Ann Minner obligingly named an aide to Vice President Joe Biden to succeed him as a seat-warming senator from Delaware to accommodate Biden’s son, Beau’s, desire to run in 2010.

My favorite gubernatorial abuser in the appointment game remains Frank Murkowski of Alaska, who, upon being elected governor in 2002, resigned from the Senate and, after a statewide search for the best qualified senator, found his daughter, Lisa, and named her.

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We have this strange exception to elections because senators were not always elected by the people. Until ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, they were elected by state legislatures. This brought about a lively commerce in the buying and selling of Senate seats and a Senate with a rather large share of millionaires. When the 17th Amendment was approved, it provided for the popular election of senators, but left the states with the right to determine how vacancies would be filled.

Given the public’s experience with Blagojevich and the other questionable gubernatorial appointments in the very recent past, this would appear to be the year to reform this abuse. But there is opposition. In Connecticut, neither Gov. Rell nor the Republicans in the General Assembly are eager to give up this gubernatorial privilege and there is little reason to doubt a Democratic governor would have a similarly self-interested, if shortsighted, opinion.

One objection is the expense, but special elections don’t happen all that often. In Connecticut, the last senator to resign before his term ended was Raymond Baldwin 59 years ago.

A more debatable objection to a special election is a provision in the Connecticut bill that calls for the election to be held 150 days or five months after the vacancy occurs. House special elections come 60 days after a vacancy occurs, 120 days if a primary is needed, and the British seem to make do with five- to eight-week campaigns to elect members of Parliament.

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Five months is far too long for a state to be without its legal complement of senators, although it can be argued Connecticut made do in recent years without the services of both incumbents when they abandoned their local constituents to campaign for higher office.

Senator Dodd must still answer to the electorate, should he run in 2010, for moving his family to Iowa in pursuit of the one delegate he famously won in the Iowa Democratic Caucus. Senator Lieberman not only disappeared from the state to run for vice president in 2000, but was also away for extended periods in his presidential campaign in 2004 and McCain’s in 2008.

Somehow, we survived the absences of both of these long-serving public servants, but that doesn’t mean we should have to wait five months for a special election to fill some future Senate vacancy. The bill should be amended to shorten that period to something on the order of 60 days and passed.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.