Au Revoir Senate

President-elect Obama is resigning his Senate seat, effective Sunday, November 16. That is 65 days before his scheduled presidential inauguration.

In line with what I wrote here, that is unusually early.

There's not a whole lot of precedent for presidents being elected to the Senate. The two such cases in the 20th century went as follows:

1. John Kennedy resigned his Senate seat on December 22, 1960, 29 days before his inauguration.
2. Warren Harding resigned on January 13, 1921, which, in the era when March 4 was the standard inauguration date, was 40 days before he became president.

There is more precedent at the vice-presidential level (vice-precedent?). The most recent senator to be elected vice president, Al Gore, remained in the Senate until the new Congress convened on January 3, 1993. The earliest date on which any incoming vice president resigned from the Senate since January 20 became the inauguration date, was December 29, 1964, when Hubert Humphrey resigned early, in order to give his successor, Walter Mondale, a seniority advantage over other new senators.

Obama has apparently made a deliberate decision not to be part of the lame-duck congressional session that gets underway next week. That will both 1) make for more of a fresh start, when he tackles economic issues in January, and 2) free him up to work on assembling his Cabinet, and other transition issues.

There is precedent for a president-elect not involving himself in economic issues prematurely. In the 1932-33 transition, Franklin Roosevelt rebuffed outgoing President Herbert Hoover's invitation for a joint statement on government actions to combat the Great Depression. That contributed to the frosty relationship between the two on Roosevelt's inauguration day, that I referred to here.