Centerfield

Baseball Crank reminds us that one of the people responsible for losing "Ted Kennedy's Seat" was ... Ted Kennedy: Lessons From The Brown Bombshell

5. Ted Shoulda Quit While He Was Ahead: The Democrats put themselves in the situation of having to call a special election in two ways. First, they changed the law in 2004 to require an election rather than a gubernatorial appointment for an open Senate seat, because if John Kerry beat George W. Bush they didn't want Mitt Romney nominating his replacement. A flagrantly opportunistic effort to change that law back petered out last summer. Second - and Erick Erickson has gotten a lot of flak for saying this on CNN, but it happens to be true - they could have held the election much earlier in a much more favorable political climate if Ted Kennedy had stepped down when it became apparent that he was dying. Ted's insistence on staying in office until his death ended up being the undoing of his party and, perhaps, of his lifelong goal of national government health insurance.

There have been a lot of calls from the Left to do away with the filibuster now that progressive health care reform has been bent, folded, and mutilated by the endless give-aways to achieve the 60-vote threshold to cut off debate. It is certainly true that the Senate is a place where a minority can have an outsize effect on the business of the "world's greatest deliberative body," especially when the political class gets it into its head to pass some sort of comprehensive reform of anything, be it social security, immigration, or health care. But, the Senate doesn't need to change its rules. We need to change who is in the Senate. It is simply a scandal that a representative democracy like the US ends up returning so much deadwood to the upper house of the national legislature.

Kennedy is not the first Senator to die of a lingering illness while in office, nor is he likely to be the last. Right now, Robert Byrd is slowly wasting away, stripped of any active committee assignments because he simply can't do the work (although I believe he remains the Senate Pro Tem, meaning his colleagues believe he is still fit enough to be third in line to the presidency). Hawaii's Daniel Akaka is 84 years old - and is the junior Senator from Hawaii! Daniel Inyoue joined the Senate 4 years before Ted Stevens. In the last 10 years we've seen Strom Thurmond leave on his shield at age 100. We have seen Ted Stevens taken out kicking & screaming at age 80+. Tim Johnson remains handicapped by a stroke, yet shows no sign of leaving office. Indeed, he won re-election in 2008! Then there's Arlen Spector who has survived a serious cancer scare, yet shows every sign of running for re-election - at age 79!

The doddering old Senate committee chairman is one of the stock characters of American political life, but at this point it's getting to be more harmful for everyone involved. The only reason to stay in office, besides self-aggrandizement is to preserve seniority, which is valuable both for the Senator and his state. But, the practical result is often a hollow shell of a man occupying a seat.

What the Senate desperately needs are not rule changes, but term limits. I'll be generous and allow for four six-year terms, which ought to be enough for the Senators and for their states. The sight of old men wasting away in office while younger generations must live with the laws they pass are locked out of office is something that should be removed from American political life.