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President Obama's nomination of Democrat John Kerry to be secretary of state sets off a chain of events that could put another Kennedy in the Senate, at least on an interim basis.

And it gives ousted Republican Scott Brown a fighting chance of returning to the Senate by midyear.

On Friday, Obama nominated Kerry, the senior senator from Massachusetts, to replace Hillary Clinton as the nation's chief diplomat. A 27-year veteran of the Senate and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry should win easy Senate confirmation early in the new year.

Brown, the junior senator from Massachusetts, won a 2010 special election after the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, and then in November lost his bid for a full term to Democrat Elizabeth Warren. He leaves office Jan. 3.

Brown has not announced his interest in the upcoming special election, but in a farewell to Senate colleagues last week, he pointedly called it "my closing floor speech for this session in the United States Senate." And The New York Times called his candidacy a "foregone conclusion," noting that his popularity would likely preclude serious GOP opposition in the solidly blue state.

A poll by WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, found high favorability ratings for Brown, a moderate who was the first Senate Republican to back a renewed assault weapons ban after the Connecticut school shootings.

Massachusetts law requires Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick to appoint an interim successor to Kerry and then to hold a special election between 145 and 160 days after the vacancy is created. The New York Times explains:

"A special election for the Kerry seat would likely occur in May or June. ... A vacancy is deemed to occur once the departing senator files a letter of resignation, even if the resignation is not effective until a later date.

"It is not clear if Mr. Kerry will submit such a letter right away or if he will wait until he is confirmed by the Senate. Even Republicans have said that Mr. Kerry would sail through the confirmation process."

At a service for the late Sen. Daniel K. Inouye at the Washington National Cathedral on Friday, President Obama said if it weren't for the example of the long-serving Hawaii Democrat, he might not have gone into public service.

Inouye "hinted to me what might be possible in my own life," Obama told the crowd, which included Vice President Joe Biden and other friends and former Senate colleagues.

Inouye, who passed away Monday at the age of 88, was the body's most senior member. He was the first congressman to serve the new state of Hawaii beginning in 1959 before moving to the U.S. Senate four years later, where he became the first Japanese-American to serve in both houses of Congress. As a U.S. soldier during World War II, Inouye fought in Italy, where he lost an arm and was later awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery.

Obama said that Inouye asked only to remembered as someone who had represented his constituents honestly and to the best of his ability.

He "embodied the spirit of aloha," the president said.

"May God grant us more souls like him," he said.

Earlier, House Speaker John Boehner praised Inouye for "all the good" that he did in Washington.

"Helping to build a new state, gaining rights and benefits for veterans, supporting agriculture, speaking out against injustice, becoming one of the most revered senators in our history," Boehner said.

Inouye's body laid in state at the Capitol rotunda Thursday and will be flown home to Hawaii for a final service before being interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on Sunday.

Since the mid-1980s, the U.S. Border Patrol has quintupled in size — growing from about 4,000 to more than 20,000 agents.

The government has constructed some 700 miles of fencing and vehicle barriers. It has placed thousands of ground sensors, lights, radar towers and cameras along the border. And Customs and Border Protection is now flying drones and helicopters to locate smuggles and rescue stranded immigrants.

So here's the question: Is the Southwest border secure?

The statistics paint a picture that says "yes." The number of illegal crossers apprehended is at a 40-year-low, which can be partly attributed to a weak U.S. job market and improving economy in Mexico. Drug seizures continue near historic highs and violent crime in border cities on the U.S. side has gone down.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says all those facts are indicators of progress in the right direction.

"If I were a police chief of a major city and I came in and I said we had reduced crime in four years by 70 to 80 percent, people would say, 'That's a great job. You're a great police chief,' " she says. "If you took that and you applied it to what's been going on along the Southwest border, you'd have to say objectively the same thing."

A Byzantine Immigration System

But more and more people are realizing that illegal immigration is tied directly to the broken legal immigration system, not necessarily security.

People come for work without visas because they can't easily get visas. Employers who need guest workers say it's a long, frustrating, costly process to get the workers.

Here's an analogy: Imagine immigration, especially from Latin America, as a two-lane residential street with a 20-mile-an-hour speed limit. Over the decades, it's grown to an eight-lane superhighway. But the speed limit is still 20 mph. That is, visas for needed workers haven't risen along with the traffic.

"If you want to keep it at 20 miles an hour, you have to put a cop every 20 feet. And that's what the 'secure the border first' people are in effect trying to do," says Daniel Kowalski, a Texas-based immigration attorney and editor of Bender's Immigration Bulletin. He says demanding border security first is backward.

"You need to line the border with border patrol, shoulder to shoulder, and that's just the wrong way to do it," he says. "It's too expensive. It's easier to fix the numbers, rather than militarizing the border."

Because the immigration system is so byzantine, up to half of the estimated 11 million people illegally in the U.S. came in legally, then overstayed their visas. No amount of border security would have stopped that.

How Can Security Be Measured?

Congress still wants to know whether all the resources along the border are working. There is no single objective measure of border security.

Until two years ago, the Department of Homeland Security used something called "operational control," which Arizona Republican Senator-elect Jeff Flake wants the department to keep using.

"In essence, it basically means if someone sneaks across, you have a reasonable expectation of catching them," Flake says. "We're talking about something that is achievable and measurable."

The House has passed a bill requiring DHS to use operational control, but the department says it's obsolete. The measure only counts territory where actual Border Patrol agents are located.

DHS says something it calls the Border Security Index will take into account other things as well: areas covered by technology, air power, the rate of violent crime.

It's been nearly three years since that new index was announced and it hasn't been implemented yet. Even the Government Accountability Office said last year that DHS needs to do a better job of reporting its effectiveness on the border. But, even taking that into account, almost everyone agrees the border is more secure than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.

Napolitano says people who demand complete border security before immigration reform are not being realistic.

"There's no border in the world that doesn't have some form of migration, legal and illegal," she says. "So saying it has to be zero is like saying we have to put the United States under some sort of Tupperware container and seal it off. That's not how our country operates."

Many lawmakers who've been blocking it now seem to realize that some sort of comprehensive immigration reform is necessary. The political reality is that more border security — or at least more accountability — is still likely to be part of any legislation.