 With this " the public , press and political parties quickly turned their attention to the case " , with the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania ( supported by their Democratic counterparts ) and several prominent politicians intervening . They moved to expedite an appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit . In a unanimous opinion , the Court of Appeals ( consisting of <unk> , Greenberg and Seitz ) confirmed that there was no restriction of any fundamental right , and therefore that the strict scrutiny process did not need to be applied . In the absence of this process , they held that the Seventeenth Amendment did not require primary elections to fill vacancies , and more broadly gave state legislatures wide discretion as to how to hold elections ; as such , the statute did not violate the constitution . In December 1991 the Supreme Court denied a writ of certiorari , presumably because the special election had already taken place in November and the issue was thus moot . 
