There is an endemic problem of dynasties and elitism in our political process. The power of Governor's to appoint vacant Senate seats is one of the more egregious examples of this. The four examples we are looking at right now are not isolated incidents, either. Six years ago, former Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski appointed his daughter to fill his vacant Senate seat. Two years before that, when Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash, his wife, Jean Carnahan, served two years in the Senate to replace him. The previous year, Lincoln Chafee was appointed to serve when his father died unexpectedly. And there is more (in the extended entry):
Appointing the spouses of deceased senators has a long and unsuccessful history as well. Four times over the past half-century, the wives of senators who died in office have been appointed.
None of them have won re-election.
There are also at least five instances of governors appointing themselves to a Senate vacancy -- Oklahoma Gov. J. Howard Edmondson in 1959, Wyoming Gov. John Hickey in 1961, New Mexico Gov. Edwin Mecham in 1962, South Carolina Gov. Donald Russell in 1965 and Gov. Wendell Anderson from Minnesota in 1976, who appointed himself to fill Walter Mondale's seat upon Mondale's elevation to the vice presidency.
It's worth noting that all five of these "greedy" governors lost their re-election bids.
While all of these appointments had to face re-election after they took office, they were still able to achieve a U.S. Senate seat without an election. Further, while these insider, dynasty, nepotism appointments clearly have a poor record of winning election once in office, that is more of an indication of just how bad the picks were in the first place, rather than a reason to praise the system for having a means of accountability.
The frequency with which family members and close aides receive appointment to Senate seats is indicative of how our broader political system is dominated by an insider elite. If these are the people who our governors turn to for such important decisions, what does it say about who they turn to for other, less public decisions? Simply put, if our political process was responsive to the will of the people rather than an insider elite, Senate vacancies would be filled by special elections, rather than by appointments. This is why it is so depressing that the Illinois special election has been put on hold.
Arguments that all of these elections would cost too much money are of the most crass, undemocratic sort that consider representative government something we should only do if we can afford it. Arguments that we shouldn't complain about the process because it might benefit our political party to avoid a special election forget that we are members of political parties because of our values, rather than purely for the sake of power. Arguments that we should keep in the system in place because that is what the framers wanted forget that the framers themselves overthrew a government, and would be horrified at the notion of a complacent people that never question authority or governmental structures.
There needs to be a constitutional amendment requiring that all Senate seats always be filled via popular elections, rather than appointments. While it seems that the corruption surrounding the Illinois Senate appointment would make for a perfect catalyst for such a campaign, the continuing nepotism in the other Senate appointments, along with the decision by the Illinois state legislature to delay a special election, it is clear that such a campaign would face a steep uphill battle.
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