Let’s start with the basics: In our political system, where individuals are asked to serve as representatives of many other people, choosing those individuals by appointment is a lousy way to go.
People should be able to elect the people who lord over them. That was the point of the American Revolution and every other democratic revolution in history.
But as it happens, sometimes an elected leader resigns or dies before their term in office has expired, so there must be some way to fill the vacated seat, at least until the next regular election. Thus was born the practice of political appointments to elected seats, a practice that’s almost a contradiction.
Because such appointments are made by other politicians, there are inherently political and because they’re political, they’re very often messy.
The politics surrounding appointments never ends at the Haines Borough, in the State of Alaska, and in the U.S. federal government.
How political are they?
Here in the Haines Borough, they can be explosive.
The borough assembly’s failure to appoint a person to a vacant seat on the assembly in 2011 led to a recall election against three assembly members. In 2017, an assembly’s refusal to approve a mayor’s desired appointment to the ports and harbors committee led police chief Heath Scott to haul up the four assembly members to the district attorney for possible criminal charges.
Here in Alaska, U.S. Senator Frank Murkowski appointed his daughter, Lisa Murkowski, to fill out the remaining two years on his six-year-seat in the Senate. Alaskans were outraged by the extraordinary and obviously plotted act of nepotism.
Most ironically, Senator Frank Murkowski was able to appoint his daughter because the Republican-controlled Alaska Legislature had changed a law to allow its U.S. senators to decide who would succeed them if they quit before their term was up. Previous to the Legislature’s switcheroo, Alaska governors held the authority to replace the state’s U.S. senators who quit at mid-term or died in office. The old law wouldn’t work for Republicans in December 2002 when Murkowski quit because Tony Knowles, a Democrat, was then serving as Alaska’s governor.
Knowles likely would have appointed a Democrat to replace Murkowski.
For Alaska Republicans, this was the second switcheroo made to state appointment laws to help them appoint an Alaska U.S. senator. The first switcheroo came in 1968, when Republicans in the Alaska Legislature, including Ted Stevens, voted to change a previous state law that required that Alaska governors, when filling a vacancy of one of its two U.S. Senate seats, to appoint a person from the same political party as the departing senator.
Alaska’s U.S. Senator Bob Bartlett, a Democrat, was ailing at the time and unlikely to complete his six-year term. But Bartlett knew the score. He left a note for the surgeon performing his coronary bypass surgery: “Don’t let your scalpel slip, because the law has changed, and the current Governor, Hickel, will appoint a Republican in my place.”
Bartlett didn’t survive the surgery. Not surprisingly, Alaska Gov. Walter Hickel then replaced Bartlett with a Nixonite Republican, state Sen. Ted Stevens, who had previously lost two elections to represent Alaskans in the U.S. Senate, in 1962 and 1968. The appointment would have been illegal a year before.
After Frank Murkowski’s appointment of his daughter Lisa to replace him in the U.S. Senate, Alaskans — both Republicans and Democrats united on the issue — changed state law to require a special election to fill out vacated U.S. Senate seats within three months of a vacancy.
Frank’s egregious act of appointment chicanery was so egregious, Alaskans finally put an end to the shenanigans, proving that reform of political appointments – at least on the state level – is possible.