Senate Seat Watch
As it looks increasingly likely that Hillary Clinton, New York’s junior senator, will be leaving the US Senate to take up the Secretary of State job in the Cabinet; the question arises of who will replace her. As the Governor is a Democrat, it’s certain that she will be replaced by another Democrat. I should point out that she hasn’t even been nominated yet, let alone confirmed. But if Sen. Clinton was to become the next Secretary of State, who should replace her?
Governor Paterson has taken himself out of contention, and it’s good that he has, because his replacement would be Dean Skelos. Naturally, the next place to look is the congressional delegation which has 22 Democrats, not including the four newly-elected members. The old-timers, like Charlie Rangel and Louise Slaughter, who already have plenty of influence in Congress, presumably are out of contention as well.
According to the NY Daily News, Representative Nydia Velazquez of Brooklyn is the favorite to be appointed. She is the current chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee. Having been in Congress for well over a decade, she has a lot of knowledge of the legislative process. And if she sought election to the Senate for a full term in 2010, she would most likely get a huge turnout from the New York City area, especially among women and Hispanics.
The other two congressmen who are often speculated about are Steve Israel, who would probably carry Long Island and the large Jewish communities across the state, and Brian Higgins of Buffalo, who will likely win huge areas of upstate New York.
My ideal choices for Hillary’s Senate seat — if she was to give it up — are Congressman Jerry Nadler, Congressman Maurice Hinchey, or State Senator Thomas Duane. All three have impeccable records on civil liberties, the Iraq War, the environment, and many other issues that we all care about. But I doubt that any of them would take it: Nadler and Hinchey have built up a lot of seniority over the years in the House and they probably have no plans to leave any time soon. As for Duane, Democrats need all the votes they can get right now to elect Malcolm Smith as majority leader of the State Senate.
The overarching question is whether Hillary will leave the Senate. We will have to just wait and see.
Related posts:
[...] Watch - Will she or won’t she be Secretary of State. More importantly, who replaces [...]
[...] the middle of last month, we wrote about the building speculation that the President-elect would nominate her for the Secretary of State position. I wrote about a [...]