The Briefing Room
General Category => Politics/Government => Topic started by: mystery-ak on November 16, 2022, 09:43:38 pm
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Schumer to nominate Murray as Senate president pro tempore
by Alexander Bolton - 11/16/22 2:52 PM ET
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced at the Senate Democratic lunch Wednesday that he will nominate Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) next month to serve next year as Senate president pro tempore, a position that is third in line to the presidency.
The nomination will need to be approved by the entire Senate Democratic Conference.
Schumer also announced that the Senate Democratic caucus will hold its leadership election on Dec. 8.
The job of Senate president pro tempore comes with a large, ornate office on the ground floor of the U.S. Capitol and a large security detail.
The current office holder, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), will retire from Senate after eight terms at the end of the year.
The most senior member of the majority party usually occupies the role of president pro tempore, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who arrived in the Senate in November of 1992, a few months before Murray, passed on the job.
more
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3738557-schumer-to-nominate-murray-as-senate-president-pro-tempore/
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For those of you, like me who wondered why the Pro-Tem instead of the Senate Majority Leader is closer in line for the presidency(like me)...
I found this at Quora, and have cut/pasted it below.
From J. David Gillespie (Political Scientist and writer)
First, the Senate Majority Leader, though generally considered in practice the political leader of the Senate, is NOWHERE (not just not the third person) in the presidential line of succession, and that is because his position is not recognized in the Constitution.
Secondly, the two people who are recognized as the third and fourth (after the Vice President) in that line of succession are members of the House and Senate respectively, holding the constitutionally-recognized titles of Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate. The Speaker is the parliamentary leader of the House in the governmental sense, but she is also the holder of a constitutionally-recognized position. (See Article 1, Sec 2, especially this: “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker….”). The Constitution also recognizes the Senate President Pro tempore (see Article 1, Sec. 3), though in practice the President Pro tempore lacks the governmental power of the Speaker and is now (and for more than a century past has been) the holder of a position awarded as an honor to the most senior member of the majority party in the Senate.
Thirdly, the constitutional line of succession does pay deference to the primary or upper position of the Senate by virtue of placing the Vice President as second in line of succession. Although the Vice President is not a member of the Senate, she does hold the constitutionally-established title of president of the Senate, the framers apparently having had the intention of the Vice President being the actual presiding officer of the Senate, with President Pro Tempore serving in times of absence from the Senate by the Vice President. In practice, the Vice President is rarely in attendance at the Senate and most of the VP’s routines are those of an executive, and it is usually a Senator other than the Vice President or the President Pro tempore who holds the gavel and presides. But the Vice President does have one legislative power and that is to cast the deciding vote in breaking ties, a responsibility particularly important for the first female VIce President, Kamala Harris, given that the party line-up in the current Senate is a 50–50 Democratic-Republican split.
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This is a bad joke. A very bad joke.