Let’s say there’s a guy - we’ll call him Crazy Bill - who is really mad at a politician. Maybe mad enough that he thinks he should kill him, and hope that someone he likes better will replace him.
Appeasing Crazy Bill would mean replacing the politician with someone less objectionable to Bill, in the hopes that Bill won’t kill him. This makes Bill less likely to kill, because he’s already getting what he wants.
Disincentivizing Crazy Bill means changing the system so that if Bill does kill the politician, his replacement won’t be someone Bill likes better. This makes Bill less likely to kill, because killing won’t get him the thing he wants.
The notable difference here is that in the former, you’re making it easier for Bill to get what he wants. In the latter, you’re making it harder.
I am rather surprise a few Republican senators have not crossed over to the other side in exchange for keeping their seniority. It is more fun to be in the majority party.
We should run in fear from the GQP, otherwise they might do something extreme like try to violently overthrow the government and kill members of Congress.
Someone once mentioned how Ben Sasse voted to confirm Kavanaugh but didn’t vote to confirm Garland as AG. That tells you a lot about the true intention of the moderate GOP.
Even if said Republican senators could get a deal they liked from the Dems for switching parties, it would last them at most something under six years until their next re-election campaign, when they would be primaried into oblivion by enraged Trumpist voters.
So, not much point unless you’re planning to retire after this election cycle anyway, and if you’re planning to retire then you probably don’t care so much about your majority status anyway. Not enough to become a pariah among your colleagues on Capitol Hill, at least.
There’s every chance that Republicans will be back in charge in 2 years. Remember when Jim Jeffords crossed the aisle to give Democrats the majority in 2001? Eighteen months later he was back in the minority when Republicans took back the chamber.
Besides, party switching is a fraught exercise. Usually you end up being despised by your prior party, and not really accepted by your new party. And unless you’re retiring you have to win in a primary for your new party, likely against a challenger who wasn’t a member of the opposition (e.g. Arlen Specter).
You and @Little_Nemo are pretty strongly misunderstanding the situation. The rule change isn’t to give in to violent Republican extremists. They can’t achieve political goals by killing a Kentucky Senator. The rule change would protect against violent Democratic (or otherwise left-wing) extremists who might want to install a Democrat by assassinating McConnell.
Imagine Trump were the VP (as he would have been with the original Constitution). How much more danger would Biden be in right now? Having the loser be the VP is a bad idea. It’s a good thing that we got rid of that rule 200 years ago, or it would pose a real risk of fucking us over right now.
Similarly, having a Senator potentially be replaced by a politician from the other party is a bad idea.
McConnell is pretty strongly disliked, and we shouldn’t provide an incentive for a left-wing extremist to shoot him and (potentially) get a Democrat into his Senate seat. Doing so is not appeasing right-wing extremists! It’s protecting against left-wing ones!
In the big picture, James Hodgkinson ended up doing a service to Republicans. He let them claim they’re the victims of an imaginary left-wing threat.
The reality is that Hodgkinson does not represent any political group. He never held or ran for elected office. He never worked in any official position. He never was a member of any organization, political or otherwise. He was never endorsed by anyone in office. He never worked for anyone in office.
Hodgkinson was a crazy man who lived on the streets. He had been arrested numerous times. He had threatened people around him, including his own children, and fired shots at people.
In the last few months of his life, Hodgkinson became fixated on Republicans being his enemies. This was insanity not a political agenda. He showed up at a Congressional event and started shooting people. One person was killed and that was Hodgkinson himself.
The only political lesson to be learned from the life and death of James Hodgkinson is that somebody like him should not have been able to legally own a gun.
Claiming that we need to rewrite laws in order to protect ourselves from James Hodgkinson is about as realistic as my joke that we need to protect ourselves from vampires.
I bet the guys who got shot at would disagree with you.
He actually shot up a group of Republican lawmakers. That’s not imaginary. You may be right that he’s not part of any broader left-wing movement to achieve political goals through violence, but it’s naive to suggest that such a thing could never exist.
Assassination is not a fictitious concern. Attempts at political assassination occur regularly, and sometimes succeed. Maybe mostly by lone-wolf whack-jobs, but not solely. Designing our institutions so that clear-eyed violent operatives can effect political change by taking out a specific politician and installing one from the opposing party is a bad idea.
I’m still seeing a false both-siderism in your argument.
James Hodgkinson was insane. There is no left-wing movement that he is a representative of.
But we do have right wing organizations who are a real threat of political violence. They tried to overthrow the government just two months ago. And they were supported by a number of Republican politicians.
If you’re really concerned about political violence in this country, you need to look to the actual threat on the right and not to some imaginary threat on the left.
Agreed, but I think the more relevant point is that assassination of sitting senators doesn’t seem to be a significant current threat for either party in the US, no matter what the state rules may be for replacing a senator who dies or retires before the end of their term.
Some states currently allow governors to appoint a replacement for the remainder of the departed senator’s term, some states require the governor’s chosen replacement to serve as a placeholder just until a special election can be held, some states require a special election without an appointed placeholder, some states require the governor’s chosen replacement to be of the same party as the departed senator.
AFAICT, none of the senators affected by any of these variant rules seem to be considered at elevated risk of assassination.
That wasn’t the reason they got rid of the runner-up VP. The reason was that Jefferson and Burr were running for President and Vice on the Democratic-Republican ticket and all their electors voted for the two of them, which resulted in a tie that had to to be broken in HR. Burr could have asked everyone to vote for Jefferson, but decided he wanted to contest. After that fiasco, they changed the rules.
Actually the previous election was also a motivation to change the system. John Adams, a Federalist, got the most votes, while Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, got the second most and was elected Vice President. They were bitter rivals and hated one another. The fact that the President and Vice President were of different parties showed the flaws in the system. And the concern was not just assassination. If Congress had been in Democratic-Republican hands, they could have impeached John Adams so Jefferson became President.