Star-Ledger editorial page editor Tom Moran has a new idea for enhancing New Jersey’s seniority in the United States Senate: Gov. Phil Murphy could appoint a caretaker senator next month after Bob Menendez’s resignation becomes effective, and then appoint Rep. Andy Kim to replace him after the election – giving Kim more seniority than other freshmen also elected this year.
The problem is that the Senate specifically prohibits the exact scheme Moran is promoting: states gaming the seniority system by moving senators around like pieces in a game of checkers.
Donald A. Ritchie, the Historian Emeritus of the U.S. Senate, told the New Jersey Globe that Senate leaders from both parties ended the practice of permitting a senator to leave office a little early to allow his or her successor to jump the seniority line.
That happened more than 40 years ago.
“It was forcing some of the senior senators to retire early,” Ritchie told the New Jersey Globe. “There was a lot of that going on in the seventies.”
Ritchie said there was a clear delineation between a real vacancy – like a death or a move to another office – and a fabricated one to manipulate the system.
Between 1974 and 1982, there were 22 resignations in the Senate so that governors could appoint the general election winners. Because the idea, which was not Tom Moran’s, became abused, the Senate stopped allowing it.
Texas tried to sneak one through in 2002 when Phil Gramm, who had not sought re-election, retired a month earlier so that his successor, John Cornyn, would have more seniority than eight other Senate freshmen. But it didn’t work.
“Owing to conference rules that sought to end the practice of senators resigning their terms early to give their successors seniority, Cornyn did not gain seniority,” a list of senators provided by the Senate Historical Office noted.
Moran notes in his editorial column that Republican governors Tom Kean and Chris Christie “appointed Republicans to fill Democratic seats, defying the wishes of voters who had elected Democrats.”
But he misses two salient details: after the 1982 election, Kean appointed a Democrat, Frank Lautenberg, to the Senate on December 27 after Brady stepped down six days earlier to give New Jersey a seniority boost. It was after Brady that the Senate changed its rules.
After Christie appointed Jeff Chiesa in 2013 following Lautenberg’s death, the Star-Ledger praised the pick “as a good choice” and disagreed with Senate President Steve Sweeney’s gripe that Christie should have honored the wishes of the electorate and appointed a Democrat.
“That’s a stretch. The state constitution grants that discretion to the governor. And he is elected, too, after all,” the editorial stated.
More worrisome is that this is Moran’s fourth error in understanding how the U.S. Senate seniority system works in just two weeks: he got an election law wrong, somehow misunderstood the State Constitution, and then got how seniority affects committee chairmanships a little incorrect.