A couple of weeks ago, Joel wrote that “few polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties strike me as abso­lutist and unde­mo­c­ra­tic as that of a gov­er­nor appoint­ing a U.S. Sen­a­tor to office in the case of a vacant Senate seat.” In today’s Times Tom Geoghe­gan argues that the prac­tice (which I don’t like either) is actu­ally ille­gal under the 17th Amendment:

Gov­er­nors don’t issue a writ or start the machin­ery for a spe­cial elec­tion as the amend­ment requires, but instead fill the post for up to two years, until the next gen­eral elec­tion. This frus­trates the whole demo­c­ra­tic thrust of the amendment.

While this has been hap­pen­ing for decades, the cor­rupt nature of the prac­tice has finally become too obvi­ous to ignore in Illi­nois, now that the United States attor­ney has a court order to have the gov­er­nor bugged. Yes, the F.B.I. com­plaint against Gov. Rod Blago­je­vich paints him as espe­cially cor­rupt. But the fact is that a cer­tain amount of polit­i­cal horse-​trading is inher­ent if offi­cials, rather than voters, fill Con­gres­sional vacancies.

This is why the writ­ers of the 17th Amend­ment required spe­cial elections.

It’s worth men­tion­ing that Geoghe­gan, a labor lawyer and the author of sev­eral books I’m eager to check out, is a new can­di­date to replace Rahm Emanuel in Illinois’s Fifth Con­gres­sional Dis­trict. Kathy G, Hen­drik Hertzberg, and James Fal­lows are all Geoghe­gan fans; if you decide to become one too, you can get involved with his cam­paign here.

A number of con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als (e.g. Richard Starr and Andy McCarthy) are trying to quash the big story out of last night’s Sarah Palin inter­view, namely her unfa­mil­iar­ity with the Bush Doc­trine. To aid this quash­ing, they’re engag­ing in a clever bit of leg­erde­main, argu­ing that, well, no one really knows exactly what the Bush Doc­trine is, because it’s gone through so many iter­a­tions and versions.

Which is true. And com­pletely beside the point.

The prob­lem was not that Palin couldn’t decide among com­pet­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of the Bush Doc­trine,* it’s that she appeared to have never heard the phrase in her life, as evi­denced by the fol­low­ing exchange:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush — well, what do you — what do you inter­pret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

No one who had heard the phrase in con­text before–or who wasn’t sure which iter­a­tion of it was meant–would ever respond with “His world view.” And even some­one who didn’t know there was a Bush Doc­trine but who was aware of the Monroe or Truman Doc­trines would know enough not to say “His world view.” He or she would also prob­a­bly know that it had some­thing spe­cific to do with using force to achieve geopo­lit­i­cal strate­gic objec­tives, and might even be quick-​witted enough to ask which ver­sion of the Bush Doc­trine Gibson was talk­ing about, to draw out some help. But “His world view?” That part just sounded ridiculous.

Nor did things get any better for Palin when Gibson tried to help her out with a date:

GIBSON: No, the Bush doc­trine, enun­ci­ated Sep­tem­ber 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what Pres­i­dent Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extrem­ism, ter­ror­ists who are hell bent on destroy­ing our nation. There have been blun­ders along the way, though. There have been mis­takes made. And with new lead­er­ship, and that’s the beauty of Amer­i­can elec­tions, of course, and democ­racy, is with new lead­er­ship comes oppor­tu­nity to do things better.

James Fal­lows at The Atlantic has more on why this mat­ters here.

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*NB: I edited this sen­tence for clar­ity, which is why it no longer matches the ver­sion Ben Smith quoted.

1/ From James Fallows’s response to Peter Navarro in the Let­ters sec­tion of the Octo­ber 2007 Atlantic Monthly:

Read­ers should cer­tainly read Navarro’s book to see his argu­ment in its full ver­sion. The notes sec­tion of his book begins, ‘Much of the research con­ducted for this book was done over the Internet.’ All of the research for my arti­cle was done on-​scene in fac­to­ries and trad­ing com­pa­nies in China.

2/ From Caitlin Flanagan’s response to Mike Males in the Let­ters sec­tion of the Octo­ber 2007 Atlantic Monthly:

In report­ing this essay, I attended an eye-​opening pre­sen­ta­tion at my children’s ele­men­tary school.