Kennedy family friend Paul Kirk to replace Senator Ted Kennedy, for now

It was only yesterday that the Massachusetts state legislature gave him the authority to appoint an interim replacement for Senator Ted Kennedy, but Governor Deval Patrick is wasting no time. Paul Kirk’s temporary elevation as Massachusetts’s junior senator brings the body’s membership back to 100. Details from the Boston Globe:

Governor Deval Patrick has selected Paul G. Kirk Jr. to serve as interim US senator, a choice that comes with the strong backing of the immediate family of the late Edward M. Kennedy, according to a person with knowledge of the selection process.

[...]

Pool video from inside the governor’s office showed Kirk and Patrick sitting in arm chairs in front of a fireplace. Kirk’s wife, Gail, sat on a sofa with Ted Kennedy Jr. On another sofa sat Vicki Kennedy and Senator John F. Kerry.

“We can’t get you down there soon enough,” Kerry told Kirk, referring to the US Senate. “Tomorrow?”

Patrick is scheduled to make the formal announce the appointment at a press conference later this morning at the State House.

Kirk, 71, is a longtime Kennedy friend and former staff member, a man so close to the family he was chosen as master of ceremonies at Kennedy’s memorial service the night before the funeral last month. An attorney who now lives on Cape Cod, Kirk worked as a special assistant to Senator Kennedy from 1969 to 1977 and is currently the chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. He is familiar with many on Kennedy’s former staff and could help smooth the transition.

via Kirk to be named interim senator – Local News Updates – The Boston Globe.

Apparently Vicki Kennedy’s support for Kirk played a strong role. I wonder if Michael Dukakis is feeling left out, or just happy that he gets to keep his head down and out of the Washington parlor tricks this autumn and winter.

Kirk’s appointment is more than a little strange – Governor Patrick needed the authority to appoint him because Demcoratic Massholes were afraid that Republican Governor Mitt Romney would convert John Kerry’s seat to a GOP vote if the state’s now senior Democrat was elected president in 2004. He wasn’t, and I guess one dumb partisan move begets another dumb partisan move.

That being said, how compromised is our United States Senate these days? With Kirk now warming a seat that is bound to stay blue, let’s review the other bizarre people that are sitting in our august upper legislative chamber:

• George LeMieux, a longtime campaign operative in Florida who Governor Charlie Crist appointed upon Mel Martinez’s snap resignation in August so that he wouldn’t be appointing a possible challenger for his own Senate campaign.
• Roland Burris, the Illinois factotum who Governor Rod “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden” Blagojevich appointed to fill President Obama’s seat because he figured he could use charges of racism to rebut claims that he tried to trade half of Illinois’s Senate delegation for a bigger paycheck.
• Edward Kaufman, a Biden family buddy who appears to be keeping his seat at a Goldilocks temperature for our current Vice President’s son, Beau.
• Michael Bennet, the fill-in for now Interior Secretary Ken Salazar who has a net negative approval rating (see Nate Silver) after his state soundly went blue for Obama in 2008.
• Kristen Gillibrand became the viable alternative for another Kennedy, “Like, you know” Caroline, and is trying as hard as she can to stay out of New York State’s endless political morass. The only reason no one is too worried about her is that the GOP hasn’t found a good carpetbagger to challenge her yet. (That, I say, depends on whether or not Paterson mans up and gets out of the race.) But she’s still warming a seat that is not yet rightly her own.
• David Vitter, or Louisiana Senator Whores n’ Diapers as we like to call him, has somehow emerged as a leading policy voice for the GOP in the Senate, in spite of his love of whores and diapers.
• John Ensign, the Nevada Republican, tried to reverse blackmail the blackmailing husband of his mistress, but failed, and got busted, and now considers it a private matter. Still, he has been neutered from his leadership role among Senate Republicans because he tried to use funny money to make a big problem disappear.
• Robert Byrd fell and had to go the hospital on Tuesday, and is basically a stunt double for Bernie in ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’ but he’s still third in line in presidential succession, you betcha.

That leaves 9 members of our august upper chamber who are serving under what I will just gingerly say is not the kindest of circumstances. Has the Senate ever had this many of its members sundered by such burdens?

What do you think of your bicameral legislature now, Founders?