Kentucky Legislature Adjourns Without Having Passed Bill to Let Candidates Run for President and U.S. Senate in Same Year

On April 18, the Kentucky legislature adjourned, without having passed SB 205, which would have let U.S. Senator Rand Paul run for re-election in 2016 even if he is also running for the Republican presidential nomination. See this story.

Kentucky, like most states, holds legislative elections this year. The Senate has a Republican majority and had passed the bill; the House has a Democratic majority and refused to consider the bill. If Republicans were to win a majority in the Kentucky House this year, the bill would probably pass in the next legislative session.

The press consistently fails to mention that Henry Clay was elected to the U.S. House from Kentucky in 1824 even though he was also running for President that year. He carried Kentucky in the electoral college.


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Kentucky Legislature Adjourns Without Having Passed Bill to Let Candidates Run for President and U.S. Senate in Same Year — No Comments

  1. Henry Clay was Speaker of the House in 1825, when John Quincy Adams was elected president by the House of Representatives. Clay had been re-elected to the House in August of 1824, but was never sworn in, having instead been appointed Secretary of State.

    You perhaps are confusing him with Richard Johnson who was elected Vice President in 1837, while serving in the US House (but having been senator in 1824). But Kentucky held its elections for the 25th Congress in August of 1837, after the start of the term, and Johnson would not have sought election.

    Or perhaps you are confusing him with John Breckinridge who was Vice President at the time of his election to the Senate in December 1859, 11 months before he unsuccessfully ran for President, and 15 months before he began his term as senator.

  2. I’m not sure why you consider it a failure of the Kentucky press to mention Clay, (or Johnson, or Breckinridge), since none were elected at the same time as the presidential electors were elected, and senators were chosen by a different electorate.

    Clay also ran for President in 1832 and 1844. In 1832, he was a senator having been elected late in 1831 for a regular term that had begun in March. In 1844, he was between his 3rd and 4th periods of service in the senate.

    None of the candidates were on any ballot in Kentucky.

    Incidentally, Alben Barkley was 4 years into his senate term when he was elected senator in 1848.

    None of the other presidential or vice presidential candidates who were born in Kentucky: James Birney, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, or Adlai Stevenson (I) were elected to office in Kentucky. Zachary Taylor was reared in Kentucky, but never held any civil office (nor had voted) before his election as President.

    Happy Chandler resigned his senate seat to become commissioner of baseball.

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