Senate Seat

Seeking a compromise in Roland Park dispute At every bargaining table, each party must start by understanding what's non-negotiable for its opposition. So in the ongoing deadlock between Baltimore Country Club, Roland Park, the Keswick Multi-Care Center and now the city, it's useful to review the non-negotiables ("Roland Park proposal imperils zoning code," letters, Jan. 5). The Baltimore Country Club needs cash - at least fair market value for the 17 acres of land it has on the auction block to pay for capital improvements for its historic clubhouse.

WASHINGTON -- Back in 1992, when his family's single-minded ambition was to gain the White House, Bill Clinton advertised his wife, Hillary, as a kind of political bonus for the country. If the voters elected him, he pointed out, they would be getting "two for the price of one."Soon after his election, he appointed her to be the driving force in perhaps the only truly bold domestic initiative of his presidency, the campaign for universal health coverage. She ran it imperiously and in the end the ambitious and worthy effort failed, shot down by the insurance industry and its mostly Republican allies.

Two days after he was expelled from the Maryland Senate over findings that he used his public office for private gain, Larry Young was warmly embraced yesterday at New Shiloh Baptist Church -- where he is a deacon -- in a rousing service that brought dozens of worshipers to the altar in a special prayer for the fallen politician."

Trying to guess just how Larry Young, the fallen Maryland senator, could stage a comeback has become a popular political parlor game in Baltimore.Even Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke has been caught up in the swirl of speculation since the Maryland Senate expelled Young last week for ethics transgressions.Immediately after his ouster, the West Baltimore Democrat vowed to return to elected office as quickly as possible.Some Baltimore political leaders think he will try to reclaim his Senate seat; others suggest he will attempt to switch into the House of Delegates.

EVERY ONCE IN a while, a stone is heaved into the political waters of Annapolis that sends out ripples whose ultimate effect can't be told.Such a rock was dropped Wednesday night at Boccaccio Restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy.At a crowded, $100-a-head fund-raiser, Del. Frank D. Boston Jr. announced that he was moving ahead with long-rumored plans to challenge Senate Majority Leader Clarence W. Blount for the 41st District seat in the September Democratic primary.Boston, 59, is taking a chance by taking on Blount, 77, the highly respected elder statesman of the Maryland Senate and a warhorse who has been a key player in the city's black political hierarchy.

As a grand jury began subpoenaing records as part of a criminal probe into Sen. Larry Young and the FBI announced plans to examine the case yesterday, the lawmaker defiantly told his supporters he will take his "people's seat" in the Senate at the start of the legislative session today.In his first public comments since a state ethics committee recommended that he face an expulsion vote for using his office for personal gain, Young told hundreds of supporters last night that he changed his decision after a heartfelt conversation with his mother, Mable Payne.

Saying the law gave him no other option, Gov. Parris N. Glendening rejected yesterday Larry Young's effort to reclaim the state Senate seat from which he was expelled last month for ethics transgressions.The day after Baltimore Democratic officials defiantly nominated Young to return to the Senate, Glendening instructed them to choose another successor by Sunday's legal deadline."Let me make this very clear: Under the law and under the constitution, I cannot make this appointment," Glendening said at a State House news conference at which he never mentioned his one-time ally by name.

MESSAGE TO LARRY YOUNG: You can't go home again. At least, you can't return to reclaim your former seat in the Maryland Senate. You were expelled by your colleagues last month and barred from the Senate for the duration of this term, which ends in January. The attorney general says you don't qualify as a replacement candidate. The governor concurs.Yet Mr. Young persists in using pressure tactics to try to have his way. He got the state central committee, which he controls, to submit his name to the governor for the Senate vacancy in his West Baltimore district.

Larry Young, the Maryland senator expelled for ethics transgressions, said on his weekly radio show yesterday that he will meet with community and church groups this week before making a decision about his political future.His district's Democratic Central Committee has scheduled a meeting Feb. 10 to interview candidates for the Senate seat that Young held for a decade.Two weeks ago, when Young's colleagues removed him for using his public office for private gain, he said he hoped to reclaim the seat.

Muriel Humphrey Brown,86, who overcame shyness to become an effective campaigner for her husband, Hubert H. Humphrey, then briefly took his U.S. Senate seat after his death, died yesterday of natural causes at Abbott Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Minneapolis.Mrs. Brown rarely appeared in public in recent years but was by the side of her son, Hubert Humphrey III, last week when he won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor gubernatorial primary.Mr. Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat, unsuccessfully ran for president in 1972.

Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. is selling his home of 41 years in Reisterstown and plans to move next month into an apartment in Cockeysville, a downsizing that has set off speculation that he will run for the state Senate in the legislative district there. Term-limited in the executive job, Smith, a lifelong Democrat who has served as county councilman and judge, has stated repeatedly that he intends to remain in public service. He told The Baltimore Sun in May that he was looking at statewide offices, and with a campaign account in excess of $1 million, he had been expected to challenge Democratic Comptroller Peter Franchot in a primary.

CHICAGO - Democratic Sen. Roland Burris, appointed late last year to replace Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate, has informed Illinois lawmakers that he did not tell them the complete story about his contacts with close associates of Gov. Rod Blagojevich before he got the job. The admission came in a sworn affidavit filed quietly by Burris last week with the Illinois House, and it raises questions about the new senator's credibility as he begins to finish...

NEW YORK - Hours after Caroline Kennedy abandoned her hopes for a New York Senate seat, political sniping broke out yesterday between Gov. David A. Paterson's camp and allies of America's most fabled Democratic dynasty. The two sides offered conflicting claims about the sequence of events leading to Kennedy's pullout and whether she was, in fact, a serious contender to fill the seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. "The events of the last day illustrate very clearly why the governor never intended her to be the senator," said a person close to Paterson.

Seeking a compromise in Roland Park dispute At every bargaining table, each party must start by understanding what's non-negotiable for its opposition. So in the ongoing deadlock between Baltimore Country Club, Roland Park, the Keswick Multi-Care Center and now the city, it's useful to review the non-negotiables ("Roland Park proposal imperils zoning code," letters, Jan. 5). The Baltimore Country Club needs cash - at least fair market value for the 17 acres of land it has on the auction block to pay for capital improvements for its historic clubhouse.

WASHINGTON - As the new Senate opened for business yesterday, it offered more story lines than a nightly telenovela. In one corner stood Sen. Joe Biden, who soon will resign his Senate seat to assume the vice presidency. Not far away sat Sen. John McCain, who lost to Biden and the man at the top of the ticket, President-elect and former Sen. Barack Obama. On the other side of the room sat Sen. Hillary Clinton, vanquished by Obama in the Democratic primaries but now likely to leave the Senate soon to serve as his secretary of state.

WASHINGTON - Democratic leaders seeking to bar Roland Burris from the Senate suffered an important crack in support as they prepared to meet with him today to begin negotiations over whether he will be able to take the seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and outgoing chairwoman of the committee that judges senators' credentials, urged that the Senate seat Burris, arguing that his appointment by Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich was lawful regardless of the corruption allegations swirling around the Illinois governor.

CHICAGO - Brushing aside charges that he tried to sell Illinois' vacant U.S. Senate seat, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich appointed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to the post yesterday in defiance of Senate leaders who said they would not admit anyone the governor selected. It was an abrupt about-face by Blagojevich, who had said after his arrest Dec. 9 on federal corruption charges that he favored a special election for a successor to President-elect Barack Obama. But the governor said he acted after Illinois' Democratic-controlled General Assembly declined to approve legislation for a special election.

With the headlines dominated by news that the governor of Illinois was apparently looking to sell off the state's U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, maybe it's time for all of us to sit down and watch Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (12:15 p.m., TCM) for a reminder of what American politics could (dare one suggest, should?) be all about. James Stewart, in a role that should have won him an Oscar as the Best Actor of 1939, is Jefferson Smith, a rube from the backwoods, picked by political bosses to fill the seat of a deceased U.S. senator.

When then-First Lady Hillary Clinton announced she was running for senator from New York in 2000, critics were quick to dismiss her as an unqualified, over-ambitious political neophyte aiming to cash in on her husband's name. Mrs. Clinton ran anyway and showed herself to be a formidable candidate, becoming the only first lady to run for office and the first female to represent New York in the U.S. Senate. Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of a former U.S. president, is, like Mrs. Clinton, a distinguished author, lawyer and longtime advocate of worthy causes, particularly in education and the arts.

But of course Caroline Kennedy will become the next senator from New York. Does she deserve it? Not really. Does that matter? Probably not. Ms. Kennedy's likely appointment to fill the seat being vacated should Hillary Clinton be confirmed as secretary of state is the sort of fait accompli Americans claim to hate, yet seem to find irresistible. We don't do birthright in this country - except when we do. John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush come to mind. We don't elect people on the basis of a recognizable name - except when we do. Who, after all, was Hillary Clinton other than the wife of a governor and president before being elected to the U.S. Senate from a state where she established a token residency?