Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Just say no . . . to Teddy’s shenanigans
By Howie Carr | Friday, August 21, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists


Photo by Herald file
No, no, a thousand times no to this last Kennedy play.

Here’s what this naked political ploy boils down to:

Sen. Ted Kennedy is basically asking the Massachusetts Legislature to repeal a law that he personally pushed through that very same Legislature in 2004. He would gut his own law in order to give a very unpopular governor the right to appoint a rubberstamp who might - might - provide the 60th vote in the Senate to ram through this Obama-care monstrosity that is vehemently opposed by an ever-growing majority of the American people.

Democracy in Massachusetts - you can smell it a mile away.

And another thing - Ted’s plea to overturn his own law was made in a letter dated July 2. But the missive did not arrive at the State House until now, after the ailing senior senator last week was unable to attend the burial of his own sister, and after his publishing company suddenly decided to move up the publication date of his memoirs to Sept. 14.

When Teddy was first handed his Senate seat back in 1962, the fix was in. Now, 47 years later, as Teddy goes out, he wants to put the fix back in. And why not - if he gets this final wish, the Kennedys can hand off what they consider their own personal Senate seat to . . . whomever.

You want irony? As the Wall Street Journal’s noted yesterday, if the state’s current succession law, which Ted used to support, had been on the books in 1961, he might never have become a senator. He was only 29 in 1961 - too young to serve. When his brother became president and resigned from the Senate that year, the governor had the right to fill the vacancy, which he did, with a placeholder. Ben Smith served until Teddy could legally run in 1962.

Now Teddy wants a new Benjamin Smith to serve for five months until the special election. And he asks Gov. Deval Patrick to get “an explicit personal commitment” that this interim senator will not run in the special election.

Only they’re not making ’em like Ben Smith anymore. Personal commitment? You mean, like Marty Meehan promising to serve only three terms in Congress or Mumbles Menino’s vow in 2001 to serve only one more term as mayor?

Ted says he is writing “about an issue that concerns me deeply, the continuity of representation for Massachusetts, should a vacancy occur.”

So why then, in 2004, did he call then-Senate president Bob Travaglini to urge him to move the legislation to create the mechanism for a special election, thus creating the situation that now concerns him so deeply?

I’m sure the fact that the governor then was Mitt Romney, a Republican, had nothing to do with Ted’s desire to take away the governor’s power.

More irony of the what-goes-around-comes-around variety: The bow-tied bumkissers of Morrissey Boulevard are carrying the water for Ted in these final days, just as they did at the dawn of his career. Obviously this is a difficult time for the Kennedy family, but how many times have we been asked to bend the law for them?

No, no, a thousand times no.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1192414&format=text