Daniel T. Shedd · April 2011
79 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 960 (2011)
Currently, thirty-three states permit their governors to appoint replacements to the United States Senate without any checks on the appointment procedure. As the previous two anecdotes illustrate, this practice can lead to political gamesmanship and political scandals that decrease public trust in the national government. The Constitution should not leave the door open to political corruption. In fact, the Seventeenth Amendment was enacted to prevent political scandals from occurring when selecting United States Senators. In order to enable the Seventeenth Amendment to fulfill its purpose of preventing such scandals, and to promote democratic values and good governance, this practice must change, and the Constitution must be amended to provide proper safeguards for filling vacancies in the United States Senate.
The constitutional safeguards that this Note proposes are threefold. First, this Note’s proposal limits state legislatures’ abilities to manipulate the appointment process by setting the procedure to fill Senate vacancies in constitutional stone. Second, it checks governors’ abilities to engage in political scandals by enabling state legislatures to check gubernatorial appointments. Finally, it checks the potential for scandal and ensures a fair election process by limiting the duration that interim appointees can remain seated in the United States Senate.
Part I of this Note provides a brief history of the procedures used for selecting United States Senators. It discusses how Senators were not always popularly elected and the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment. More specifically, it details the history of Senate appointments, analyzes the problems associated with gubernatorial appointment powers, and shows that the potential for abuse is large. Part II of this Note discusses various proposals that have been suggested to remedy this problem and demonstrates why they fail to provide an adequate solution. Part III proposes amending the Constitution to place checks and balances on the gubernatorial appointment power. It explains how the new Amendment solves the current problems that are associated with the gubernatorial appointment process and how it avoids the pitfalls that are associated with other proposed solutions. Part III also shows how this proposal considers the timing, costs, effects on subsequent elections, and emergency situations better than other proposed solutions.
