… in tortured election rules. In 1812, our Governor Gerry redrew electoral district boundaries to ensure the reelection of incumbents and the term gerrymandering was born. Lately we’ve decided that we should change the rule on what happens what a Senator leaves office in the middle of his term. The rule was last changed in 2004 to prevent a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, from appointing a successor to John Kerry, whom we felt sure that the country would grow to love as its President. When Senator Kerry ascended to the White House, a special election would be held and the people of Massachusetts would pick a new senator. Now that Ted Kennedy has followed Mary Jo Kopechne into the grave (having outlived his victim by 40 years), folks want to change things back to the way they were five years ago. Our current governor, Deval Patrick, is apparently better qualified to choose a senator than was Romney.
More: New York Times story.
[You might wonder how Massachusetts legislators could possibly have the time and energy to rewrite laws every five years. According to the NCSL, we live in one of the few states where the legislature is in session “all year”. Given that the legislature has been controlled by the Democratic Party almost continuously since 1812 and that the Democrats have a supermajority, it is unclear to me why they need to be in session (and get paid by the taxpayers, approximately $200,000 per year including travel supplements, health care, and pension benefits) for more than one day. The party’s Web site contains a platform. They could have staff members come up with a full set of legislation for each year, circulate it around for discussion via email or Google Docs, and then come into the State House to approve it in 10 minutes. The only reason they should need to come back to the State House would be if there were some dramatic change in external conditions, e.g., a catastrophic fall in tax revenues.]
A Democrat from Cambridge is a very different animal than a Democrat from Western Mass.
Jeff: They are so different that they need to confer for 365 days per year, minus holidays? Even their pension benefits wouldn’t suffer if they met only 1 day per year. For a Massachusetts legislator (and perhaps the rest of our public employees?), working 1 day is sufficient to accrue an entire year’s worth of pension benefits. Many of the states in http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=12603 are rather evenly divided between Republican and Democrats and yet they manage to complete their legislative work in just 3-5 months per year.