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Sunday, February 09, 2014
Kansas Senator In Danger Of Getting Lugared
A U.S Senator from Kansas is fighting for his survival because his opponent is making an issue of the fact that he hasn't had a home in the state in decades. Sound familiar? Check out this story by the New York Times' Jonathan Martin on Sen. Pat Roberts' struggle to convince Kansans that he still lives there:
It is hard to find anyone who has seen Senator Pat Roberts here at the redbrick house on a golf course that his voter registration lists as his home. Across town at the Inn Pancake House on Wyatt Earp Boulevard, breakfast regulars say the Republican senator is a virtual stranger.
“He calls it home,” said Jerald Miller, a retiree. “But I’ve been here since ’77, and I’ve only seen him twice.”
The 77-year-old senator went to Congress in 1981 and became a fixture: a member of the elite Alfalfa Club and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which made him a regular on the Sunday talk shows. His wife became a real estate broker in Alexandria, Va., the suburb where the couple live, boasting of her “extensive knowledge” of the area.
But such emblems of Washington status have turned hazardous in a Republican establishment threatened by the Tea Party and unnerved by the defeat of incumbents like Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who was viewed as a creature of the capital.
Mr. Roberts is now desperate to re-establish ties to Kansas and to adjust his politics to fit the rise of the right in the state. But his efforts underscore the awkward reality of Republicans who, after coming of age in an era of comity and esteem for long-term service, are trying to remake themselves to be warriors for a Tea Party age.
In an interview, the three-term senator acknowledged that he did not have a home of his own in Kansas. The house on a country club golf course that he lists as his voting address belongs to two longtime supporters and donors — C. Duane and Phyllis Ross — and he says he stays with them when he is in the area. He established his voting address there the day before his challenger in the August primary, Milton Wolf, announced his candidacy last fall, arguing that Mr. Roberts was out of touch with his High Plains roots.
“I have full access to the recliner,” the senator joked. Turning serious, he added, “Nobody knows the state better than I do.”
That assertion is disputed by Tea Party activists energized by Mr. Wolf’s candidacy.
“In four and one-half going on five years of existence have we been contacted by Senator Roberts or any of his staff? Not once,” said Chuck Henderson, a Tea Party activist in Manhattan, Kan., who mocked the notion of the senator’s “official” residence here . . .
Martin's story says little about of Roberts' Republican primary opponent, Milton Wolf, than he's a Tea Party candidate. He's actually a physician from a well-established Kansas family who very publicly challenged Obamacare, a move that led the IRS to harass him and some within the Obama administration to try and get him fired from his job. Did I mention that he's also a cousin of President Obama on his white mother's side of the family?
8 comments:
Anonymous
said...
You should be a resident to represent the people. Since the Constitution doesn't require it, perhaps an amendment is in order...it appears the framers forgot an important detail.
The framers beleived the senators were to be liasons between state soverereign powers and the confederation. They have only been representatives of the people (directly) since 1913. If they honored their original assignment, and spent less time and money running for office,I would not care where they live. Repeal the 17th amendment
Paul, I don't think that "inhabitant" has been defined by law. When I was researching Lugar’s residency, I did not find a case that defined inhabitant.
Gary is correct in using the term "Lugared." I first saw it published in POLITICO.
Lugar's bigger problem was always voter fraud. He was using someone else's house, a house he had sold decades earlier as his voting address, swearing under oath he lived there when he clearly did not. People try to claim the AG's opinions said it was okay to do this but in actually if you read them closely they didn't say that at all. They never said Lugar could abandon his residence and continue to vote using that residence. They were always very careful to not say that.
Paul, That is not what the AG's opinion said. He expressly stated that your residence was frozen in place once you were elected to Congress regardless of whether you maintained a physical residence at that location. He took the view that you did not need to maintain a physical place of residence within the state once you were elected to Congress. He believed it was perfectly legal for Lugar to continue voting at the address he last resided before his election to the Senate. The Marion County Elections Board had issued an opinion decades earlier to that effect, which is one of the reasons the election board felt it had to make clear that was not the law. They were astonished to learn that Lugar had engineered that interpretation of the law decades earlier.
8 comments:
You should be a resident to represent the people. Since the Constitution doesn't require it, perhaps an amendment is in order...it appears the framers forgot an important detail.
Wouldn't a repeal of the XVII Amendment have the same effect?
obviously the ambassador to China should live in the US...
The Constitution says that a U.S. Senator has to be an inhabitant of the state he or she represents.
The framers beleived the senators were to be liasons between state soverereign powers and the confederation. They have only been representatives of the people (directly) since 1913. If they honored their original assignment, and spent less time and money running for office,I would not care where they live. Repeal the 17th amendment
Paul,
I don't think that "inhabitant" has been defined by law. When I was researching Lugar’s residency, I did not find a case that defined inhabitant.
Gary is correct in using the term "Lugared." I first saw it published in POLITICO.
Lugar's bigger problem was always voter fraud. He was using someone else's house, a house he had sold decades earlier as his voting address, swearing under oath he lived there when he clearly did not. People try to claim the AG's opinions said it was okay to do this but in actually if you read them closely they didn't say that at all. They never said Lugar could abandon his residence and continue to vote using that residence. They were always very careful to not say that.
Paul, That is not what the AG's opinion said. He expressly stated that your residence was frozen in place once you were elected to Congress regardless of whether you maintained a physical residence at that location. He took the view that you did not need to maintain a physical place of residence within the state once you were elected to Congress. He believed it was perfectly legal for Lugar to continue voting at the address he last resided before his election to the Senate. The Marion County Elections Board had issued an opinion decades earlier to that effect, which is one of the reasons the election board felt it had to make clear that was not the law. They were astonished to learn that Lugar had engineered that interpretation of the law decades earlier.
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