Massachusetts Passes Senate Appointment Law, But Without Super-Majority For Emergency Measure

Looking around one finds widespread reference to the Governor having the power, by himself, to file an "emergency letter" that waives the 90 day waiting period for a law to take effect. The only media source I've seen saying otherwise is, well, you guys, quoting that Republican yesterday, when he claimed that this is only true for referendum laws. However subjecting this to the "3 minutes on google" test one also finds actual examples of Massachusetts laws where the governor filed an emergency letter:

The state law authorizing principals to suspend or expel students in certain circumstances, General Laws chapter 71, section 37H, has been amended to eliminate the requirement that the principal notify the school committee when s/he decides to suspend rather than expel a student. The amendment is effective as of July 13, 1994, the date on which Governor Weld signed an emergency letter so that principals may be fully authorized to effect school discipline decisions when schools reopen in September 1994.

That link actually has the emergency letter in question, by the way.

I, William F. Weld, pursuant to the provisions of Article XLVIII of the Amendments to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Referendum II, Emergency Measures, do hereby declare that, in my opinion, the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, safety or convenience requires that the attached Act, Chapter 51 of the Acts of 1994, entitled "An Act Further Regulating School Suspensions," the enactment of which received my approval on July 1, 1994, should take effect immediately.

So that principals may be fully authorized to effect school discipline decisions when the schools reopen in September, I further declare that, in my opinion, it is in the public interest that this Act take effect immediately.

I can't seem to find any evidence this was subjected to a referendum.

If the governor can issue an emergency letter to reduce the amount of overhead for the process of a public school principal disciplining a student, surely the governor can do same to guarantee Congressional representation for the state. If there is some kind of requirement that referendums be involved, it doesn't seem to me to have come up in previous situations where the governor used this emergency power.

I think if you guys are going to treat as as credible as you have this claim that there's some sort of constitutional issue with passing an emergency law in MA with only the governor's support, you need to produce some sort of actual evidence for the claim and not just a vague off-the-cuff speculation by one Republican official.

Even if there was a debatable legal issue here, I don't see exactly how the Republicans could get a court to really enforce it. Once Patrick goes ahead and appoints, the Senate will attempt to immediately seat and swear in the Senator. And once he's in, he's in. Even if a court declared the Senator unlawfully appointed, it wouldn't have any power to tell the Congress what to do, and the Senator would remain a Senator (sort of like some of the issues we saw arise earlier this year w/Burris and Franken). And by the time the legal stuff really got sorted out, January would have rolled around and the eventual replacement Senator would take office.

The only option the Republicans would have would be filibustering his seating--which I highly doubt would be supported by Kennedy's closest Republican friends (Hatch, the Maine Senators, etc).

In other words, I suspect this is a non-issue.