in the Senate

[calimac]

We pay for cable TV now - I consider this a violation of my moral principles, but I'm a politics buff so I'm used to it - so I figured that at least for my sins I could watch the dramatic moment this morning when the U.S. Senate convened and either did or did not swear in two disputed senators.

No such luck. When I turned on the set just before session time, C-SPAN was showing the House. The House! The call-in talkers were babbling about Roland Burris, but C-SPAN was showing the House. The Senate might have been on C-SPAN2, but we don't get C-SPAN2. No other stations showed the slightest interest. PBS was showing Ernie and Bert.

By the time I found that the Washington Post web site had a live feed of the Senate floor, it was half an hour later and the swearing-in was almost over. There's Cheney offering congratulations to Mark Warner. I just bet he is.

But just after that I saw that the Senate's website had updated the list of Senators. (It still showed last year's until this morning.) Here they are. Neither of the disputed seats was filled. Durbin and Klobuchar will have to stand for Illinois and Minnesota by themselves for a while yet. Clinton and Salazar have not yet resigned; neither has Biden, even though his new job is guaranteed. None of the new senators have put up actual web sites yet; they just have placeholder sites with little biographical blurbs.

They don't count the electoral vote until Thursday, so that's the official news for the day.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Clinton and Salazar have obviously prudently decided not to throw away the bird in the hand until they've captured the one in the bush. Biden may well have decided that, since he was simultaneously re-elected to his Senate seat and to the VPery, that it would be administratively less confusing if he took his oath of office before resigning. That's what LBJ did in 1961.