With the death of New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg, not a single World War II veteran remains in the US Senate. That’s a sad reminder not only of the passage of time but also of the decline of military service as a prerequisite for public office.
Lautenberg, who died yesterday at age 89, served five terms over the course of two nonconsecutive stints in the Senate. Rarely did he deviate from any down-the-line liberal positions. Though he’d originally hoped to run for re-election next year, he stepped aside after Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced he would launch a Democratic primary challenge.
As governor, Chris Christie will pick Lautenberg’s replacement. Among the decisions he must make is whether to pick someone who will serve solely as a placeholder and whether to hold a special election this year or to leave it until 2014.
Some Democrats say the Republican Christie must name a Democrat to succeed Lautenberg. Fact is, there’s no reason Christie shouldn’t name a Republican.
Lautenberg’s return, after all, was possible only because of a highly dubious, last-minute switcheroo Democrats hatched when scandal-scarred Sen. Robert Torricelli quit his re-election bid after the deadline for replacing a candidate on the ballot. As we wrote at the time, it worked only because the New Jersey Supreme Court effectively held state election law irrelevant.
In other words, absent the ballot shenanigans, this is a Senate seat that might well have gone Republican. Amid the howls of protest likely to greet any GOP appointee, we do well to remember that any Republican Christie lawfully sends to Washington would arrive with more legitimacy than Lautenberg did in 2002.