The Case For A National Recall Election

[MellowOne]

THE CASE FOR A NATIONAL RECALL ELECTION

Why Wait Three Years for Our Next President?
NEW YORK--By August 2003 California Governor Gray Davis' approval rating had
plunged to 22 percent. Two months later, he lost a special recall election.
Now it's George W. Bush's turn to take a drubbing. The latest CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll finds that only 37 percent of Americans think he's doing a good
job, a record low for him and a dangerous drop below the historical benchmark
of 40 percent.
"When a president falls below 40 percent approval in public opinion
polls--as President Bush has done twice in the past two months--it's usually a sign
of serious political danger," writes Richard Benedetto in USA Today. "Since
1950, five of the eight other presidents who fell below 40 percent--Harry
Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush--lost their
bids for reelection or opted not to run again. A sixth, Richard Nixon, was
overwhelmed by the Watergate scandal and resigned. Only two, Ronald Reagan and
Bill Clinton, turned things around." But even Clinton never regained his
former appeal. His hand-picked successor, vice president Al Gore, won the 2000
election by such a narrow margin that Republicans were able to steal it away.
The "political capital" Bush claimed after the 2004 election has vanished
over the last year. Dead Americans piled up in Iraq and New Orleans, his
closest political allies were indicted for corruption and treason, gas prices
soared and his party's right-wing Christianists stabbed him in the back over the
Harriet Miers' nomination. All of Bush's best-laid plans--to privatize Social
Security, pass another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and possibly expand
his wars to Syria and Iran--lie in ruins. And it's only going to get worse now
that his moderate and centrist Republican allies in Congress are beginning
to peel away: some to appeal to swing voters in next year's midterm
elections, others to align themselves with John McCain's incipient 2008 presidential
campaign and some simply because Bush's poll numbers make him radioactive.
George W. Bush, a tiger who so recently assigned himself the right to
assassinate American citizens at will, has been defanged. He's as pathetic and
powerless as Saddam Hussein. He is done.

"Lame duck" doesn't cut it. Unless Bush resigns, the world's sole superpower
faces the dismal prospect of three long years under a dead duck president.
Who will extract us from two losing wars? How will we pay off the $8 trillion
national debt he ran up? America needs a strong president yesterday.
Bush could save himself and the nation three years of marking time by
resigning. Or Congress could do the right thing and impeach him for his countless
crimes. Maybe Bush and Cheney will get indicted for their roles in outing CIA
agent Valerie Plame. But our constitutional system only allows for impeaching
individuals, not whole administrations. If Cheney is indicted and forced to
quit, Bush will appoint a replacement--Washington scuttlebutt points to
secretary of state Condi Rice. If Bush falls, Rice ascends. If something happens
to Rice, the person she chose as vice president succeeds her. All the
political hacks who lied and schemed and whose incompetence led to the current crisis
of leadership--Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Hadley, Karl Rove--stay in place.
The hydra lives. More young men and women die in Iraq.
One solution is to establish a California-style recall system on the
national level. If a significant percentage of Americans loses confidence in the
president and his administration to the extent that they're willing to sign a
recall petition, a special election should be held within three months. The
number of required signatures should be high enough--California's system calls
for 12 percent of the number of people who cast votes in the preceding
election--to ensure that recalls are only held as the result of widespread disgust
among the citizenry.

To avoid disruption, the constitutional amendment creating the recall
provision could prevent such elections from being held more often than, say,
annually. And a recall won't automatically result in a new party taking over the
White House--just a new administration. But it would replace our current system
of political stagnation with a more dynamic democracy.
The threat of recall would make sitting leaders responsive to the people
more often than the current four-year election cycle, and would allow disastrous
and unpopular leaders like Bush to be replaced posthaste. Of course,
national recall elections wouldn't guarantee that the people would always be happy
with their leaders. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man who replaced Gray Davis
after the recall, currently "ranks among the most unpopular governors in modern
California history," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. But Californians
don't have to wait until the next election to get rid of him.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20051202/cm_ucru/thecaseforanationalrecallelection_

[tx_dem41]

1. Just what we need....the day after inauguration, the official recall..

campaign will begin. Partisan warfare, as horrible as it is now, will increade one hundredfold.

[Burning Water]

2. I disagree with the thrust

of this argument.

My own feeling is that the "people" should learn to live with their mistakes until the next regularly scheduled election. Yes, this would be good if it were currently in place to get rid of Bush. But, and it is a big but, it isn't.

What that means is that, if it were passed to take effect with the next president (and it would not be passed any sooner, constitutional amendments take time) the Repukes could use it to destabilize the administration of the legitimate Democratic President Clinton, or whoever. There would certainly be enough Repuke voters to sign a recall petition.

And it would be used to destabilize anytime the political winds shifted. This may be tolerable in a state government (I don't really think so, but I'm willing to concede the possibility), but at the national level, no.

Nope, I think it better to let the American people learn their lessons for the next three years. Then maybe they will learn better which lever to pull.