Will Congressman Stephen Lynch (D-South Boston) end up in President Joe Biden’s administration?
On Monday this week, Biden said that he will fill vacancies on the Board of Governors for the U.S. Postal Service. It’s the independent agency that selects the postmaster general. The current postmaster general is Louis DeJoy, a Republican appointed to the position in May 2020.
However, Politico reports that if the Biden administration ousts DeJoy, then Lynch could be a possibility for the position. He has been a staunch defender of the postal service in his time as a congressman and he was an early backer of Biden’s presidential campaign.
But if Lynch leaves his job representing the state’s Eighth Congressional District, who will run to replace him?
On the Democratic side, there are many possibilities, but what about people running from the Republican Party and elsewhere? A Massachusetts political insider told NewBostonPost there would be two names to watch out for: Bob Hedlund and Tom Koch. Both are mayors in the district.
Hedlund, a Republican, is the mayor of Weymouth. He has served in that post since 2016. Before that, he was the state senator for the Plymouth and Norfolk district in the Massachusetts Senate. He served in that position from 1991 to 1993 and then again from 1995 to 2016.
Back in 2010, Hedlund considered running for a seat in the state’s now-defunct Tenth Congressional District (which included the South Shore) after then-congressman Bill Delahunt (D-Quincy) announced he would not seek re-election. However, Hedlund decided against it — in part because he had a newborn child that year, as The Patriot Ledger reported at the time.
Koch, the other person the political insider mentioned, is the mayor of Quincy. Koch has served in that post since 2007. Formerly a Democrat, he resigned from the party in 2018 after the party chairman Tom Perez said there was no place for pro-lifers in the party. Since Koch is pro-life, he is now unenrolled.
When Koch left the Democratic Party in 2018, he still supported Congressman Lynch, according to Christian Daily, but also said he believed that life begins at conception.
A special election in the Eighth Congressional would favor the Democrat running for office. It is a D+10 district, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index. That means it is 10 points more Democratic than the average Congressional district in the country.
Hedlund and Koch could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
(AP photo) 
