A Massachusetts Election For US Senate; Well Isn't That Special!
by Isaac Mass
The special election ruse perpetrated by Massachusetts' democratic legislators has become a farcical example of the failure of a one party system. Less than a month before the parade of liberal caricatures came to Boston to crown John F. Kerry the Democrat's presidential nominee, the bean town democratic home team decided to take out an insurance policy. Throwing away hundreds of years of precedent and brushing aside the concerns of nonpartisan political watchdog common cause, the Massachusetts legislative leadership chose to strip Republican Governor Mitt Romney of his power to make a appointment to the Senate should the home town boy make good in November. In place of the appointment they chose a shotgun 145-day special election.
The key beneficiaries of the new special election race are the Massachusetts congressional delegation many of whom have accumulated million dollar campaign war chests but face little or no competition for re-election. The common thread among these congressmen: they are all white, they are all male, and they are all Democrats. This stand in stark contrast to the last Republican Senator from Massachusetts Edward Brooke III, whom George W. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to this summer for being the first African American Senator elected in the United States since reconstruction. There was no way the Massachusetts Democrats were going to let a candidate like that have a chance to make his case.
Electoral engineering is not a new vocation in Massachusetts and local observers are seldom surprised that the Democrats in the state legislature continue to play games that would make Governor Eldridge Gerry proud. Gerrymandering districts and election dates in order to divide political and racial minorities making it impossible for them to be elected is a favorite pastime among Massachusetts Democrats. This year House Speaker Tomas Finneran was strongly chastised by the state Supreme Court for Boston redistricting plans that isolated and limited minority districts. Common Cause recognized the problem calling on Massachusetts to, "take the best of other states' ideas and create a more open and fair process for drawing congressional and legislative districts. Political gerrymandering was pioneered here, and we should be one of the first states to end the practice. In doing so we can turn democracy right-side up again, with voters selecting their representatives and not the other way around."
Still, the special election is the preferred tool of Massachusetts electoral engineers. Just a few months before the their sacking of a US Senate race they tried to rig an election in their own State Senate by deciding it would be fair to have a special election for the Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex Senate district seat vacated by Cheryl Jacques (D) on the same day as the hotly contested Democratic primary with local boy John Kerry on the ballot. Republicans who had no contest appealed to the State Supreme Court and lost, and a popular State Representative Scott Brown (R) barely beat a neophyte Jacques staffer Angus McQuilken (D) running for his first elective office. Only the full weight of the Governor Romney's support and over a hundred thousand dollars balanced the race. I guess it should have been no surprise that they didn't want Republicans to show up at that election. What was a surprise was when they illegally kept Republican candidates off the ballot. The State Senate controversy came on the heels of one in the House. In 2003 Democrats in the legislature swore in Matthew Patrick (D) in to office for the 3rd Barnstable district despite the fact that Larry Wheatley's (R) razor thin 17 vote loss was being protested among strong evidence of election day irregularities including his name not appearing on some ballots, incorrect ballots given to voters and polls closed temporarily during peak hours in conservative precincts.
This contest made the Florida recount look like a trip to Disney World. Republicans in Massachusetts might not be so outraged by the call for a special election if it were not for the clear historical hypocrisy. US Senator Edward Kennedy was one of the first Democratic Party leaders to call for a special election to fill the Kerry seat. However in 1980, when Kennedy himself was running for President and the gubernatorial appointment to replace him (had he not had an lethal aquatic mishap at Chappaquiddick and lost the nomination) would have come from Democrat Edward King, we heard no cry from Teddy about the will of the people at that time. In fact the Democrats didn't exactly complain when in 1960 Democrat Governor Foster Furcolo appointed Benjamin A. Smith II who served until a regularly scheduled statewide election in 1962, when Ted himself was elected to fill out the rest of his brother's term after being elected President of the United States from his US Senate seat in Massachusetts. In 1978 when Paul Tsongas edged out incumbent Edward Brooke III Massachusetts lost its last Republican United States Senator. In 1996 with the defeat of US Representatives Peter Blute and Peter Torkelson the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation became all white, all male and all Democrat and has remained so for almost a decade. With twelve members of the delegation Massachusetts is the largest state with a homogenous delegation. Alaska, Idaho, New Hampshire, and Wyoming all have delegations that do not include a single Democrat while Hawaii, North Dakota and South Dakota don't have a single Republican. The common thread between every one of these states except Massachusetts is that none of them has more than four members in both houses of congress. A completely Democrat delegation is probably not representative of a state that has elected Republican Governors contiguously since 1990, but then again you can't exactly redistrict a Governor's race.
You might think that allowing Governor Mitt Romney to appoint a successor to Kerry, should he be elected president, would at least give Massachusetts one Republican legislator. However that is no certainty either; in the only chance to appoint someone to a vacant elected office Romney named a Democrat David Capeless as the Berkshire County District Attorney. It is funny that there was no cry for a shotgun special election for that seat. I guess the Democrats only want the people to choose when they can't fix the appointment. It's too bad because a Massachusetts member of the majority party would make it much harder for the congress to steamroll over or worse completely ignore notoriously liberal Massachusetts.
Kennedy and the other Massachusetts Democrats believes that the United States Senator should be picked, by the people and not through patronage politics and who is going to argue with them, but don't the people deserve a real election rather than a fast and loose special election designed to put their hand picked congressman in office. Political appointments seem an anathema to our system, but even worse is changing the rules of election law in the heat of an election. You've just got to wonder how much Teddy will care about this issue on November 9th if the voters return G.W. to the White House and J.F. K. to Massachusetts. One thing is for sure; if the Kerry wins there won't be any Mr. Smith going to Washington from Massachusetts.
August 12, 2004
Isaac Mass is an At-Large City Councilman in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and the Republican State Committeeman from the Hampshire Franklin District.