Chris Bowers says:

First, at a Senate progressive media summit today, Senator Charles Schumer said that he was unhappy about the amount of stimulus money set aside for mass transit and rail. He indicated that several other Senators from highly urbanized states were also unhappy about this portion of the stimulus, and that when the legislation reached the Senate, they would be jointly pushing for an increase in money set aside for mass transit and rail. The current amount for mass transit and rail in the stimulus bill is only $10 billion.

This reminds me of something. Around seven percent of the nation’s population lives in New York State. But the constitution allocates just two percent of the nation’s senators to my home state. That’s too bad, and it’s particularly a problem in policy areas such as transportation where we get a structural bias away from the needs of places like New York. But do you know what’s even worse? Right now New York really has only one Senator since Hillary Clinton obviously isn’t focusing her energy on this matter, but David Patterson hasn’t gotten around to naming a replacement yet. He’s doing a disservice to his constituents and to residents of big cities everywhere.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, Caroline Kennedy is withdrawing from consideration.

Looks like David Patterson may just kick the can down the road:

Sen. Bill Clinton? Sen. Mario Cuomo? Don’t completely rule it out. The former president and the former New York governor are among several boldface names being touted as possible “caretakers” for New York’s Senate seat — people who would serve until the 2010 elections but wouldn’t be interested in running to keep the job.

That’s probably a decent idea. But I have to say that in my view both the Illinois situation, the Delaware situation, and the New York situation all basically serve to illustrate the over-arching point that states would be well-advised to adopt a rule whereby Senate vacancies will be filled by special election. The constitution lets them do this, they just need to walk through the open door. Meanwhile, as a pure tactic matter I’m baffled that Patterson didn’t just act quickly to designate NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. That would have been the obvious thing to do, and nobody would have serious second-guessed it had it been done swiftly. Instead, dawdling created this Caroline Kennedy opening and how Patterson’s put himself in an awkward position that he could have easily avoided.