2012 LEGISLATIVE ISSUES
Improving the Process for Replacing Elected Officials
When Senator Robert C. Byrd passed away in June 2010, his death set off a chain of reactions that has monopolized our state with Supreme Court litigation, extra primaries and elections for U.S. Senate and Governor, and disputes over how to govern the state Senate. All of this extra activity was caused in part by a decision the founders of our state made to have the state Senate president temporarily step in to replace a governor, rather than paying a lieutenant governor to wait in the background in case the governor would need to be replaced. For a longer vacancy, the drafters of our constitution preferred to have the people elect a replacement governor.
Unfortunately, the language that was chosen nearly 150 years ago was not 100 percent clear about how to handle these vacancies. Acting Governor Earl Ray Tomblin appointed a task force to come up with a new proposal to clarify the transition when there is a vacancy. The Legislature took that proposal as a starting point and has been studying the issue during the 2011 monthly interim meetings.
I served as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee Interim subcommittee assigned to study this topic. Our proposed amendment to the state constitution will have a working lieutenant governor (i.e., he or she will be assigned cabinet level responsibilities). Modeling our proposal on the federal constitution, our lieutenant governor will be chosen by the successful candidate for governor, and the two will run as a team if the amendment passes.
As chair of the House Committee on Constitutional Revision, I will help shepherd this proposed amendment through the state Legislature. If it passes both the House of Delegates and the Senate by 2/3rds vote, it will then be put up for a vote by the people of our state.
While studying the policy of replacing elected officials, we also confronted the issue of how to handle situations when an elected official is unable to perform his or her duties. Examples of thorny situations that have arisen recently in our state and elsewhere include elected officials with dementia, mental illness, shootings causing loss of speech, and even an unexplained disappearance, such as the trip the governor of South Carolina took to Argentina, when he claimed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Our subcommittee concluded that we need legislation giving clearer direction on who should decide and on how to make decisions about whether elected officials are capable of returning to their positions. The advantage of legislation is that it is easier to change than the Constitution if the process does not work well. Our proposed legislation will also require counties and municipalities to adopt policies to make temporary and permanent replacements of elected officials.
When we draft legislation we are usually responding to a current issue and trying to use language that will cover situations in the future. Our founders clearly did not foresee all of the issues that we have experienced in the recent past when they adopted our state constitution. Hopefully, we will succeed in improving the process for the future.
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