There clearly needs to a rules for circumstances like this. The people do not have a functional representative at the moment and haven’t for month. That isn’t democracy and is not what the intent is. Y’all need to organize with each other and become actively political. I don’t mean protests and marches, I mean help each other learn how the procedures of politics functions and start using them.
the Kentucky lawmaker hasn’t voted in nearly a month
Missing X votes per term should be grounds for impeachment or recall or something. Being unable to fulfill your obligations to your constituents and still occupying the position is disgusting. I don’t really agree with his constituents, but we all deserve our constitutionally guaranteed representation. People deserve sick leave, but there needs to be a mechanism to stop this kind of exploitation of basically an unreplaceable position.
Not “grounds for”, it should be automatic. The system has lots of mechanisms to remove bad actors, but due to the inherent obstructionism in the system it’s impossible to actually trigger them.
Sick leave is fine, but the job has to get done regardless.
For automatic triggers you need SOME way to combat extreme unfairness (like something calamity induced for example), but any way i can see to fairly do that doesnt really work in a 2 party system. A multiparty system would be better protected against voting with the party vs voting according to your morals, or whatever you would call what is happening over there.
I guess in the current state of the dysfunctional US legislative + judicial system that unfairness would be a small price to pay.
I think the constituency should be able to decide. If there’s a natural disaster or something and the person is either helping locally or somehow affected and the opposition attempts to rush through votes to get a special election where several displaced people may be unable to vote I don’t want them to have that power. At the end of the day the people being represented should be able to decide what to do.
Maybe automatic makes more sense, I just don’t love policies where the people affected have no say. I feel like they are easy to abuse. I know they could technically reelect the same person, but as is people struggle to get to the polls. I can’t imagine rushing a special election during some kind of disaster. It’s a lot of money and stress if people don’t actually want the change.
In the US elections are entirely up to the state, regardless of any other factor: a state legislature can constitutionally address any unusual circumstances, like a natural disaster, according to its needs.
As a separate issue, in most states the governor simply selects replacements for vacant offices, like US Senator, and would also be able to do so in the event of any extreme circumstances.
But Mitch McConnell himself worked to change this in Kentucky in 2024, as soon as he realized he wasn’t going to run again and his health might give out on him: he wanted to ensure Gov. Beshear, a Democrat, could not select his replacement.
The law in Kentucky that he helped to push through, requiring a special election for his replacement, IS automatically triggered and only bars a special election from three months prior to a regular election. If that deadline is passed, in this case August 3, then the good people of Kentucky only have one senator instead of two until January.
But to have a vacancy, someone has reveal the truth that there actually is a vacancy to be filled. So the suspicion now is that the Republicans are going to try to hide McConnell’s condition until the first Tuesday in August – the last day a Kentucky special election can be called – so that Thomas Massie, a Republican who just got primaried out of his own Congressional seat, can’t make a run for McConnell’s now obviously vacant Senate seat.
This is an interesting debate – X link / (xcancel link) – around the minutiae of it; apparently no matter what happens now a legal challenge awaits in Kentucky. That’s what happens when someone like McConnell pushes through a badly written, ill-thought piece of legislation that isn’t clear enough: whoever doesn’t like it has grounds to sue.
Which is to say that he didn’t just fuck it up for his own vacant seat, he fucked it up for Kentucky as a whole, or at least until that law gets changed, by tying the governor’s hands when ANY state or state-related federal office becomes vacant.
If this is too long I apologize; I started off answering your own comment and then it expanded to the current situation. I hope you find it useful.
I mean, letting the constituency decide does sound an awful lot like a special election 😉
They are basically equivalent, I just figured having an out if desired is better than forcing an out. So collecting signatures for a removal vs making a whole new campaign.
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Not voting is perfectly valid. It’s what the Democrats should do.
Also if this is implemented a majority can get all other members kicked out by making a surprise session at 2AM or something.
Elsewhere someone suggested it should be mandatory and not an option and I made a similar argument as you. I agree that it shouldn’t be automatic, but people should have the option to recall them for excessive absences in my opinion. I’m not suggesting it be required or anything.
Recall should be an option yes.
Rigor tortoise.
The only question swirling in my mind is how long they’ll Weekend at Bernie’s him before admitting the truth.
After August 3 apparently, after then it is too late to put someone in for him until the election.
That only works if they can keep everyone involved quiet. If he’s actually deceased, that fact is going to leak.
Sounds like he’s brain dead which fits with “found unconscious”. They can keep him on life support for months
That’s my guess as well. There was also reporting that said CPR was administered. When that is done on a frail elderly body, it creates many more problems than it solves.
He started with cardiac arrest and now he’s got maybe a chest full of shrapnel as well: he’s only leaving feet first, IMO.
5% survival rate for people his age.
My totally unfounded theory is that he’s just hooked up to a bunch of machines to keep him “alive” and they’ll pull the plug after that.
It really does make the most sense given the info at have so far.
Makes sense, sounds horrific, especially I’d the only reason is political.
Hos daughter getting off of X and all the other silence. It feels like someone pulled everyone aside and was like "we’re gonna keep this dude “alive” and you all need to just take this for the team otherwise the democrats will win…or something.
In Texas they keep braindead pregnant bodies alive so they can give birth months later, even against family wishes.
Is there a link for that?
Makes the most sense to me.
He’s probably on a machine.
Knowing Trump he’ll let it slip as soon as he can.
They’re not dumb enough to tell him, right?
Didn’t even know the guy… I like my politicians alive
Death certs are public, give it two weeks and you can just foia the answer.
Totally a normal thing a person does when they’re trying not to scream at everyone to leave them alone because they’re trying to mourn they deceased parent because dirty soulless politicians want them to keep the death a secret for their political games.
Totally normal to have your wife fly to China as soon as you have a heart attack and are sent to the hospital, too /s
Of course she took off as soon as she could. She never expected that job to last over 33 years!
Yes, she had to file her dossier with the station chief.
I don’t know what this is, but I feel like I should upvote it.
If I had to guess based on the blur, I think it’s the guys that carry a coffin on their shoulder while dancing.
It’s the dancing crab / rave crab meme.
But your guess works just as well.
I see crab rave, but don’t get the connection
I’m like 90% certain its crabdance/crab rave, something I’m not actually familiar with but which many many many people on the internet say they will be posting when certain horrible people die.
Why, I do not know.
This ENTIRE situation is PROOF that Trump runs the MOST TRANSPARENT Administration EVER!
-Free Thinking Alpha Republicans!
He’s as spry as a dead 92-year-old man.
I think there are way more wishes of “drop dead already” than “speedy recovery”…
The best part is it’s legally unclear how this will resolve, they’ll likely be able to just stay silent and block any attempt for a special election and have a decent legal argument for it. One last fuck you from Mitch.
If they delay so they don’t have a special election, wouldn’t it be up to the governor to appoint a new Senator? That seems worse for Republicans, since Andy Beshear is a Democratic governor.
Not in Kentucky. It used to be that way but as soon as a democratic governor was appointed they removed that option, and can only have a special election after they have been declared dead and some other steps.
They passed a law saying that, but the Kentucky constitution still says otherwise. So we’ll see what happens.
Do you trust Democrats to do anything besides roll over when things are not as easy as they could possibly be?
I don’t trust them to, of course not. I’m just pointing out the actual legal situation. The law is blatantly contrary to Kentucky’s constitution.
Can you provide a link to that? I haven’t seen anything like that reported. I have only seen it reported that the KY Constitution constrains the timing of special elections such that the GOP needs to hide McConnell’s condition for three more weeks so that it will be for a special election to be scheduled.
Some crypto guy on X did a deep dive into the minutiae:
Apparently the law itself is so poorly written as to give anyone grounds to sue, which knowing McConnell might have been the point: in election law, timing is EVERYTHING.
It was something I read in a Reddit discussion. Rather than rely on that, I figured I’d go to the horse’s mouth and read the Kentucky constitution directly. Section 152 covers how to handle vacancies. Unfortunately it’s in old-timey legalese and is rather lengthy and complicated. So I had ChatGPT break it down for me.
Turns out there’s an interesting wrinkle.
The Kentucky constitution is quite explicit; “Vacancies in all offices for the State at large, or for districts larger than a county, shall be filled by appointment of the Governor”. A Senate seat counts as an “office for the State at large” because they represent the entire state.
The argument that the statute is unconstitutional is fairly straightforward:
- A U.S. Senate seat is a statewide elected office.
- Section 152 says statewide vacancies “shall be filled by appointment of the Governor.”
- “Shall” is mandatory language.
- The legislature cannot override a constitutional command through ordinary legislation.
The problem is the 17th amendment of the United States constitution, which was ratified years after this section of the Kentucky constitution went into effect. The American constitution supersedes state constitutions. The 17th amendment was about how state legislatures choose senators, and it says the state legislature may empower the governor to do so. Which apparently gives final say as to how senators are appointed to the state legislature. So maybe the legislature can make that decision now, even though the state constitution says otherwise.
Nothing’s ever simple. :(
I dunno, I’d recommend the governor at least try appointing someone. Stuff like this never gets sorted out until it actually goes to court.
Yes but if it needs to go to court it’s already pointless because it’ll take too long. And also we just had the supreme court somehow narrowly avoid reading the plain language of the constitution as its written so let’s not pretend that even something stated outright is enough to stop Republicans
If Americans have simply given up on the notion of rule of law or the primacy of constitutions then there are far bigger problems to address here than a mere Senate seat.
Why not try? Don’t just preemptively surrender, make the Republicans actually show themselves for what they are.
Well here’s to hoping they grow a spine after August 2nd when it’s too late for a special election that they can appoint a temp person or better yet force them to reveal his status to remain in the run.
He ded
