Democratic Senator has a stroke.

Dr Adequate said:
The 17th Amendment leaves it up to the Governor of the State.

The precedent is that the Governor appoints the spouse, if there is one.

But even if the Governor breaks precedent, this only last until elections are held, so it can only briefly change the composition of the Senate over the head of the people.

"When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct."

I am not an American, but I play one on TV. Kind of like Hugh Laurie, only more charismatic and better looking.
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Are you smoking crack? Precedent is for the spouse? It does happen on occassion, but it's a small minority of the cases.

The real precedent is for the governor to appoint someone of his own party, and to do it quickly.
 
Regardless of anyone's political views ot the fallout, I hope that Senator Johnson recovers completely.
 
"I saw him; he looked great," Reid said. "To me, he looked very good."
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Link

Guy's in a hospital bed with his head swathed in bandages, and probably unable to speak, and Harry Reid says, "he looked great." Man's obviously been to Hugo Chavez school.
 
I suspect he will continue to look good to Harry Reid as long as he's breathing
 
Foolmewunz said:
South Dakota SoS has commented that they don't have a clear rule on what they would do about a Senator who is incapacitated. If a Senator dies, the governor replaces him, but they'd probably have months of internal wrangling in the state to change their own law.

It's not clear that he's actually had a stroke, although it sounds so. He was taken in with "stroke-lke symptoms". Evidently he was on the phone with reporters and started stuttering and got disoriented, but he finished the phone conference, so it may be a "mild" stroke (there's a better term for that, I'm sure, and I don't mean to minimize the topic, either).
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Sounds more like a TIA. Which can be called a mini stroke, but as the T is for transient it is not necessarily resulting in brain damage
 
BPSCJ:
Guy's in a hospital bed with his head swathed in bandages, and probably unable to speak, and Harry Reid says, "he looked great." Man's obviously been to Hugo Chavez school.
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No, looks much more like a graduate of the Bill Frist School of Remote Political Brain Function Diagnostics.
 
Couldn't we say that in a sense of fair play we get to incapacitate one Republican senator?

OK. That was tasteless. In all seriousness, I think the saddest part of this, politically, is that in a house of 100 senators + 1 tiebreaker, it is all so incredibly partisan that there is a huge, huge, difference between 51 and 50. Ideally, there ought to be enough people who vote their conscience instead of the party line that one vote couldn't make all that much difference. It just shouldn't be so incredibly important that someone dying or going into a state of ill health could provoke a political crisis in this way.
 
Meadmaker said:
Couldn't we say that in a sense of fair play we get to incapacitate one Republican senator?
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Precedent in Australia is for one member of the other side to abstain to cover the person unable to attend. I think it is called a 'tie'.
 
Foolmewunz said:
South Dakota SoS has commented that they don't have a clear rule on what they would do about a Senator who is incapacitated. If a Senator dies, the governor replaces him, but they'd probably have months of internal wrangling in the state to change their own law.

It's not clear that he's actually had a stroke, although it sounds so. He was taken in with "stroke-lke symptoms". Evidently he was on the phone with reporters and started stuttering and got disoriented, but he finished the phone conference, so it may be a "mild" stroke (there's a better term for that, I'm sure, and I don't mean to minimize the topic, either).

My mother suffered a mild stroke in her late 50's, and lived for another twenty years with only minor memory loss.

Have already seen some CTers commenting that it was a Bush/Republinazi play.

One on the comments to this news item:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/13/politics/main2258875.shtml
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According to CNN, it's the result of a congenital condition that was just waiting to happen one day.

According to the senator's spokeswoman, Julianne Fisher, Eisold said the bleeding in the senator's brain was the result of pressure from blood vessels that are too close together, a condition known as congenital arteriovenous malformation.
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http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/12/14/johnson.ill/index.html
 
gtc said:
Precedent in Australia is for one member of the other side to abstain to cover the person unable to attend. I think it is called a 'tie'.
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Well that's mighty darned civilized. I can't see it happening in the US, but one could always hope.
 
Tricky said:
If he declines, do you suppose the Republicans will struggle to keep him alive like they did Terri Schiavo?
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If he declines, do you suppose the Democrats will struggle to have him starved to death like they did Terri Schiavo?
 
Ah hah!

If I was a conspiracy theorist, the gerbils in my brain would be working overtime to connect this with UFOs and the NIST. :boggled:
 
BPSCG said:
If he declines, do you suppose the Democrats will struggle to have him starved to death like they did Terri Schiavo?
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If they behave anything like they did in the Terri Schiavo circus, they will struggle to have his doctor act according to his wishes or, if he is not able to speak for himself they will struggle to have the person he has chosen to make decisions for him make those decisions. I fail to see how you arrived at your point of view about their behavior in the Schiavo case.

Daredelvis
 
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fishbob said:
That is a dishonest characterization of the Schiavo situation.
And you know it.
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I'm sorry, I misspoke. I meant to say the Dems struggled manfully to keep her from being starved to death.
 
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