Politics 2000

Sarah Palin announced today that she’ll resign as Alaska’s governor, effective July 26. Lieutenant Governor Shawn Parnell will become governor then. Parnell and Palin agree on most issues so a seamless transition is expected.

Palin decried the national media and opposition research as she explained why she’s leaving the state house. She said she’s had to spend a lot of time and money–both personal and taxpayers’–to defend against frivilous charges of ethics violations. Palin stated that, although she’s been cleared in all 15 cases filed against her, she thinks she’d better serve Alaska from outside the governor’s office.

Palin’s political action committee is likely to remain operational. The governor has discussed finding top-notch Republican candidates to run for office. Pundits thinks she’ll take a brief respite from public scrunity before resuming efforts to run for president in 2012.

Indeed, Palin might be better served away as a private citizen if she wasn’t planned to run for re-election. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are both former governors. They’re also past–and possibly future–presidential candidates. Ronald Reagan wasn’t damaged by being a former California governor in the 1980 presidential contest.

That said, none of those men resigned from office. Quitting the governorship can’t be considered a positive. Perhaps Palin feels she’s in the same boat as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, albeit for very different reasons.

Maybe she thinks she can’t focus on helping her state given the barrage of ancillary issues affecting her family and her. Sanford faces the same problem for another reason.

After a process that seemingly would never end, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Al Franken is the rightful winner of the state’s U.S. Senate election last year. Outgoing Sen. Norm Coleman could conceivably have tried his luck in federal court but the odds of getting a favorable result certainly weren’t good.

Instead, Coleman conceded the race. Franken accepted victory and plans to begin his term next week. Congress is in recess this week for Independence Day.

Franken will be the 60th member of the Senate’s Democratic Caucus. Independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders caucus with the Democrats.

Getting 60 votes to break any Republican filibusters will be hard. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd haven’t been in Washington a lot this year while battling health problems. There will also be issues for which a few Democrats will want concessions to cast votes. The cap-and-trade bill that passed the House last week comes to mind immediately.

A military coup in Honduras this week has brought the Central American nation two presidents. The original leader, Manuel Zelaya, is in detention in Costa Rica after Honduran soldiers arrested him and sent him to the neighboring country.

Honduras’s Congress elected Roberto Micheletti to replace Zelaya, an ally of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Micheletti and Zelaya both are members of Honduras’s Liberal Party but Micheletti opposed an upcoming referendum championed by Zelaya.

The Congress accepted Zelaya’s letter of resignation yesterday but Zelaya claims he never wrote such a letter. He maintains he is still the democratically elected leader of Honduras. Zelaya’s referendum, which would remove the ban on presidents serving more than one term, was deemed illegal by the nation’s supreme court. Today’s vote was expected to bring violence, even before the coup.

Chavez vowed to overthrow the new government. Many world leaders condemned the first military coup in Central America in 16 years. It’s clear though that the military supports Zelaya’s ouster. Their attitude must be changed–through economic, political or military means–if Zelaya is to return to power.