With Sen. Kennedy’s passing, the future of his now vacant senate seat could have immense implications for the fate of health care reform. Under current Massachusetts law, an election to fill the seat must now be held within the next 145-160 days. That’s under a law the Democratic legislature passed in 2004 to prevent then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R) from appointing John Kerry’s successor should Kerry have been elected president. Shortly before his death, Kennedy appealed to state leaders to change the law saw that a senator (needless to say, a pro-health care reform Democrat) could hold the seat during the crucial health care votes this fall.
Nothing happened before Kennedy’s death. So what happens now? Can they still change the law?
Eric Kleefeld looks at the legal question and the political situation in the Bay State to find out what is likely to happen next.
Remember the reports yesterday of the Democratic headquarters in Colorado vandalized by a pack of crazed and feral Tea Partiers? Well … seems like the story may turn out a bit different. Zack Roth reports.
Kennedy at Rabin’s funeral …
“On the morning of the day before the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, Senator Ted Kennedy called the White House to inquire if it was appropriate to bring to the burial some earth from Arlington National Cemetery. The answer was essentially a shrug: Who knows? Unadvised, the senator carried a shopping bag onto the plane, filled with earth he had himself dug the afternoon before from the graves of his two murdered brothers. And at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, after waiting for the crowd and the cameras to disperse, he dropped to his hands and knees, and gently placed that earth on the grave of the murdered prime minister.
No spin, no photo op; a man unreasonably familiar with bidding farewell to slain heroes, a man in mourning, quietly making tangible a miserable connection.”
MJ Rosenberg has more.
Late Update: Another reader who was there at the graveside shares another recollection … Read More
Slideshow: Ted Kennedy lived long enough to see a black man elected President.
Rep. John Dingell tells TPMDC: I don’t care who the health reform bill is named after so long as there’s a bill.
Here’s Ted Kennedy, from early 2007, laying into Senate Republicans for refusing even to allow a vote on raising the federal minimum wage, which had stagnated for a decade. It’s vintage Teddy Kennedy and puts what’s coming this fall into an important perspective.
It’s worth a few minutes of your time. Watch it.
Earlier today we noted that there does not appear to be any legal impediment to Massachusetts changing its law and allowing Gov. Patrick (D) to immediately appoint a caretaker successor to Sen. Kennedy. Now the Times is reporting that the push the change the law and quickly name a successor is intensifying.
Kansas Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins (R-KS) says the GOP must find its “great white hope” to lead the party back to power in Washington.