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Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., freezing up on Wednesday raises the question of what would happen to the 81-year-old’s seat if he dies or otherwise leaves office before his term ends. Thanks to a 2021 McConnell-backed Kentucky law, if the Senate minority leader vacates the seat that isn’t up for re-election until 2026, he’d be replaced by a fellow Republican.
So even though Kentucky has a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, the seat would stay in GOP control. That wasn’t the case before the 2021 law, according to The Courier Journal, which noted: “Historically, Kentucky’s governor has been able to choose anyone — of any political party — to fill in temporarily if a vacancy pops up in the Senate, whether that happens by the senator’s choice, expulsion or death.”
Beshear vetoed the bill, claiming it contravened the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The purpose of that amendment, Beshear said, was to remove the power to select senators from political party bosses. The GOP-led Kentucky Legislature overrode the veto.
The resulting law gives the governor a choice, but from a list of three names submitted by the state executive committee of the same political party as the senator whose seat is being filled. Kentucky’s other U.S. senator, Rand Paul, is also a Republican.
Of course, any mention of filling vacant spots and McConnell recalls his holding open the Supreme Court seat left by Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, and his rushing to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat when she died in 2020. Both seats could have been filled by Democrats but were filled by Republicans, thanks to McConnell’s gamesmanship backed by dubious reasoning.
To be sure, no one believed that dubious reasoning — that Scalia’s seat should have been filled by the next president in 2016, and that Ginsburg’s seat actually didn’t have to be filled by the next president in 2020. But no one had to believe it for Republicans to cement a supermajority on the high court.
McConnell and the GOP know the results are what matter, and so a Democratic governor filling his seat with a Republican would be fitting if that’s how his tenure ends.