Massachusetts and Illinois: Naked partisanship

How Democrats Win Senate Seats

By Bruce Walker
Sunday, October 4, 2009

The Democrats have done it again. When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts and John Kerry was running for president, the ultra-partisan Massachusetts Legislature changed the law to remove from Governor Romney the right to appoint a successor to Kerry, if the senator should be elected president.

The new law required, instead, that the people of Massachusetts elect the replacement for a departing senator. There was no grand public motive behind this new law: Democrats just did not want a Republican governor appointing a Republican to Kerry’s Senate seat.

Now a Democrat is governor and the law, until just now, required an election rather than an appointment to fill the seat vacated when Teddy Kennedy died. Does the Massachusetts Legislature trust the people to choose the replacement for Kennedy? No, in fact it is afraid that the people, if they chose the replacement for Kennedy, might elect a Republican. So the Democrats, concerned as ever only with power, changed the law so the Democrat Governor Deval Patrick can appoint Kennedy’s replacement until the special election next year.

How can democracy be expected to work when such naked partisanship governs the actions of the majority political party? Recall how Barack Obama’s senate seat was filled. “Blago,â€