Ezra Klein, one of the hardest working reporter-bloggers on the web, writes:

Looks like the effort to allow Deval Patrick to appoint an interim senator to Ted Kennedy’s seat is gaining steam in Massachusetts. The House speaker has apparently given his blessing to the effort, and a hearing has moved forward to Sept. 17. This seems like something of a no-brainer: The people who elected Ted Kennedy presumably wanted a senator able to cast an affirmative vote on health-care reform. That was, after all, Kennedy’s top priority, and he was hardly silent about it when running for office.

But of course this is far from a no-brainer, for reasons Frank Phillips outlined in the Boston Globe less than a week ago.

Under the 2004 law, if Kennedy were to die or step down, voters would select his successor in a special election to be held within five months of the vacancy. But the law makes no provisions for Massachusetts to be represented in the Senate in the interim. In the meantime, President Obama’s plan to overhaul the nation’s health care system, the fate of which may hinge on one or two votes, could come before Congress.

When Rudy Giuliani flirted with suspending term limits in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, he was rightly castigated. It is easy to see why Massachusetts voters would want to replace Senator Kennedy very quickly; that was a sound reason to oppose the 2004 law.

I’ll add, briefly, that while Senator Kennedy has been lauded for his contributions to expanding the American welfare state, he deserves credit and praise from conservatives for spearheading consumer-friendly deregulation, as Nick Gillespie of Reason has observed.

There are many who believe that Kennedy was less an American hero than a reckless scoundrel who was directly responsible for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. David Weigel of The Washington Independent points to anti-Kennedy sentiments being expressed on the right, and I’ve encountered a fair bit of this among my close friends. I’ll just note the following: In reading about the Chappaquiddick incident, one is truck by how much American politics has changed in the intervening years. Weigel writes:

Kennedy got better treatment because he was a Kennedy, and the country had watched him lose two brothers to assassins’ bullets in the six years before the accident. It’s so obvious that it’s hardly worth saying, but it seems to have escaped him.

This sounds right, yet it should also be said that a Kennedy or a Bush or a Clinton or an Obama would not be treated the same way today. And if liberals are right to believe that Senator Kennedy was a vital and indispensable figure, this raises questions about the rigorous scrutiny to which we subject the personal lives of elected officials who are guilty of far less egregious infractions. One recalls the reaction to George W. Bush’s decades-old DUI charge during the 2000 presidential campaign.

One can imagine a utilitarian calculus, in which a member of the anti-war left argues that while Kennedy engaged in wrongdoing, he also helped millions of Americans via the creation of various social programs; in contrast, this same anti-war liberal would condemn President Bush for his role in the deaths of Iraqi civilians since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. When President Reagan died, some liberals chose to condemn him for, among other things, his failure to reckon with the threat posed by the AIDS epidemic. Very few also praised him for promoting human rights in the Soviet bloc and also in authoritarian anti-communist states like the Philippines. President Obama won considerable goodwill when he half-heartedly praised Reagan during an early presidential debate, and Paul Krugman still won’t forgive him for it.

All this is to say that I think these questions are thorny and not terribly productive.