ordinarily, I would say you are right. And I may be (I hope that I am an alarmist.
But sometimes I look at this guy, and I say, “Jesus, just how crazy is he.?” My best friend quite casually pronounced him nuttier than Nixon, which to me is scary as shit…
e Chaney would do anything substantially different (or be better) than GW in the top slot?
certainly any impeachemnt remedy envisages a companion bill for the real boss…
a recall, of course, encompasses a second line for replacement choice if the recall succeeds.
That’s how it works in California, right?
To put it delicately, you aren’t the most rational creature when it comes to GW. Personally I think the assessment that you ‘may’ be an ‘alarmist’ concerning Bush is one I would serious consider were I you. 
I wouldn’t say Bush is ‘crazy’ either…unless you mean ‘crazy like a fox’. I think he plays up the ‘good ole boy’ persona for effect…and I think he also plays up the ‘tough as nails President’ as well. Myself, I’m just counting down the days until we get another wonderful politician in there. Soon enough we’ll have another fool in the WH to bitch about…
-XT
(BTW, for my own education, is ‘whose’ supposed to be a contraction of ‘who’ and ‘is’? Wouldn’t it be “who’s”?)
Not where the reflexive operation embraces an inanimate rather than animate object.
So, not only do you want to push this thing through for Bush, you want to either bundle it together somehow (which I don’t think CAN happen) or do a separate impeachment for Chaney as well…all in 2 and a half years?? Yes?
Er…do you have a cite that it would actually work this way at the Federal level? I don’t believe that a Presidential Recall is even really possible, but I’m certainly not believing that you get to write in on a second line who you would want. Hell, we’d get fricking Eminem or someone on Dancing With the Stars as president. Of course, you might see that as a step up…
-XT
I believe I have elsewhere referenced my record of having predicted the cancellation of a sizable percentage (*considering the extremity of the measure…) of the last nine presidential elections…
*22%
And what, pray tell, are your qualifications for judging someone else’s judgement skills? For all we know, you could be the one whose Rationale-O-Meter is miscalibrated…
Rationale-O-Meter
Only an ingrate would cavil at any support, but candor obliges me to acknowledge the heavy burden you volunteer to carry here…
It probably is in my case. However, I’m not thinking it takes someone with a profound skill in judgement in this case. Nor yours. 
Besides, it was supposed to be merely funny…
-XT
in this hypothetical universe, we are first about the business of amending the constitution to provide for the recall of the president. Thus, we may draft our amendment to provide for the adoption of the california system.
(watch out world, here comes Arnold. …A runaway convention refusing to stop with one amendment, takes a crack at the native born requirement…Talk about your law of unintended consequences
Very true. I conceed the point…IF you could get a Constitutional Amendment passed you could certainly put in whatever provisions you also wanted…in your hypothetical universe.
Of course, perhaps they would choose to set aside the entire constitution and make GW King or something. :eek:
-XT
Why do you find this scary? If there were such a widespread support for entirely rewriting the constitution, in all likehood, nobody would bother about following the procedures mentionned in the current constitution to do so. For instance, the congress could write a new draft and have it approved by popular vote or something similar.
At the end of it, a constitution is only a piece of paper. It stands only as long as it’s generally supported by the population. If it isn’t anymore, then people won’t care about following its provisions to draft a new one.
Finally, why would the prospect of a new constitution be so scary? In all likehood, the main rights, freedoms, etc… people feel are important would be kept. And if they don’t care anymore about them, then, once again, the constitution is worthless, and could be suspended on a whim. If 90% of the american population wanted Bush to become dictator for life, then he could just proclaim himself dictator for life without worrying about the existing constitionnal procedures for revisions.
So, the only issue is whether or not the US population would support a complete overhaul of the constitution, not whether or not there’s an existing procedure to rewrite it entirely. There’s no constitution in the UK, the british system could be entirely changed overnight to become, say, the People’s Republic of England and Wales, so if they were like you, british people should be very scarred. But there’s no chance that such a thing would happen, because there’s no support for such a change.
By the way, I would add that there’s something I don’t like about constitution. We don’t get to to approve it. Nobody asked for my opinion about the french one, and barring you being an immortal, you probabbly didn’t have a say in the american one, either. So, IMO, there must be a way to amend, suspend, entirely rewrite a constitution. There’s no conceivable reason why, in a democracy, we should be held by a choice made by long dead forefathers.
Actually, I think that ideally, a constitution should have to be periodically reapproved. We should have, at least once in our life, a chance to approve or reject the constitutionnal system of the country we’re living in. Of course, that could prove a dangerous exercise, but, once again, if people aren’t concerned anymore with fundamental rights, for instance, then they’re going to dissapear, whether or not they’ve been written on this piece of paper. And having to “review” constitutions from time to time would open debates, allow for minor changes (say, in the USA, suppressing the electoral college), rewriting (say, still in the USA, the weird article about the right to own weapons and militias), additions (the debate about abortion), etc…For example the OP proposal of a recall procedure could be implemented. If major changes (say, bolishing fredom of speech or religion) are seriously discussed, it’s already too late, anyway, so there’s no need to worry about it.
If low popularity numbers were a reason for recall, we wouldn’t have had a president in the last 8 presidencies to survive… well with the exception of Bush W.'s first term…
Some people have REALLY short memories… Clinton, Bush the first, Regan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy (yes JFK); ALL had popularity numbers of less than 50% for a significant portion of their terms…
the fear of a constitutional convention arises from an apprehension that given the chance, modern americans would show a very short sighted failure to appreciate the bill of rights, and excise several of them from the new draft…
When thinking about supporting laws like this, you should always consider whether you’d want that law to exist when the tables are turned. The Democrats were heavily in favor of a ‘special prosecutor’ law when Reagan was in office. So they got a special prosecutor, and it turned into a nightmare for Bill Clinton.
If there’s a ‘Presidential Recall’, just imagine what will happen if a Democrat wins the White House next time around, and the Republicans maintain control of the House and Senate, and Republicans outnumber Democrats by 55-45 in the nation as a whole. Suddenly that law won’t look so attractive.
certainly one would do well, if drafting the amendment, to set the bar for recall high. a stringent requirement for the collection of signatures, for instance, would, I think, include a bar on the professionalisation of the process (ie, no $ for sigatures collected…) as well as a supermajority for the recall vote itself, (2/3? 3/4?)