The Massachusetts State Senate's last-minute legislative acrobatics have highlighted a question that perpetually haunts the political realm: Must politicians work for the law, or must the law work for them?
Governor Deval Patrick is expected to sign a bill that the State Senate passed yesterday in a 24-16 vote allowing him to appoint a temporary replacement for the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy. The stand-in would serve only until a special election on Jan. 19 but could seriously impact the fate of the health care legislation now being discussed in Congress — as well as any other legislation that comes up for a vote.
Ensuring that a state can fill both of its allotted seats in the U.S. Senate is a noble pursuit. The Daily does not take issue with the State Senate's decision yesterday. It is the reasons for which the bill was necessary that raise the question posed in the first paragraph.
If Patrick signs the bill, it will overturn a law put into effect in 2004 when a Democratic majority passed legislation that would have prohibited then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, from appointing a replacement for Sen. John Kerry in the event that the former won election to the presidency and vacated his Senate seat. The Democrats' bill, now law, stated that the governor could not make a temporary appointment and that the state would have to wait for the results of a special election to receive a new senator.
At the time, Romney called a spade a spade. "It is clearly partisan," he said of the bill, according to the Boston Globe. "This is coming up because there is a Republican governor."
With yesterday's vote, Romney's diagnosis has found the ultimate validation. The legislature's decision to effectively reverse the 2004 decision no doubt hinged on the national political situation. Yesterday marked the first committee hearings in the U.S. Senate for a major health care bill. With Kennedy's seat open, the Democrats expect to come up short of the 60 votes they need to stop Republican filibusters in a final vote on this issue. A second Democratic senator from Massachusetts would be a welcome relief for them.
The Daily is fully aware that maneuverings and power plays are as old as politics itself. We harbor no illusions about the morality of government; our leaders are human. But the decisions of the Massachusetts State Senate highlight two disconcerting realities of U.S. politics: willfully acute partisanship, and flippancy regarding the concreteness and sanctity of laws.
Partisanship at the expense of productive collaboration or beneficial compromise is all too common in American government. Discourse between parties has devolved into inflammatory rhetoric that distracts us from the issues our country should be focusing on. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the town hall meetings on health care reform and the complementary debate on Capitol Hill — which everyday looks more and more like just another one of these town halls. The sad thing is that the rhetoric works: Americans, and people in general, tend to believe what leaders tell them. Only when those leaders are exposed to be in egregious violation of the public's trust do they lose it — as was the case in the Watergate scandal — and this disillusionment can have even more detrimental effects on the national psyche and political discourse.
The recent events in Massachusetts also illustrate the fact that the state's Democratic leadership is willing to flip its interpretation of good public policy like hamburgers, just in order to keep the patty tinted blue. This type of conduct undermines stability and compromises the credibility of leaders who urge their constituents to respect the sanctity of the law.
