US Senate race still not over

We still don’t know the actual composition of the United States Senate that will face President-elect Obama for the next two years. There’s been a lot of publicity about the choices to be made to replace Barack Obama (Jesse Jackson Jr?) and Hillary Clinton (Caroline Kennedy?), with a stench of scandal surrounding the first and some amazement involved in the second.
At least we know who will replace Joe Biden. Delaware’s Democratic governor, Ruth Ann Minner, has announced that she will appoint Biden’s longtime senior adviser Ted Kaufman to succeed Biden in the Senate. The procedure for the relevant State Governor to choose a replacement for a Senate seat until the next biennial election cycle is one that non-Americans at least find opaque if not bizarre.
But it gets worse. In the state of Minnesota, they have still not concluded the election of one of their two senators a month and a half after the ballot because of recounts and disputes that remind one of the fiasco in Florida in 2000. You can see a summary of the Byzantine manoeuvring here.


 




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