Recall elections for all politicians?

Great Debates
1

Pretend for a moment that we’ve initiated a Constitutional Convention, and it would be relatively easy to add an amendment to the Constitution.

Would you support adding an amendment to extend recall elections to apply to U.S. Senators, Representatives, and Presidents? Why or why not?

Recall elections currently apply only to state and local elected officials. It always struck me as a reasonable check on politicians so they can’t completely disregard their constituents while in office, then pay lip-service to them come election time and coast on their incumbency.

Existing provisions rely entirely on their colleagues to remove them from office. It seems like the majority of the time that won’t happen, because they’re just as likely to *agree with their colleagues because they’re also guilty to a degree of the same corruption or disregard for their constituents, and don’t want to indict themselves by default.

2

Right off the bat, I’d so NO for Representatives. They already have to run for re-election every 2 years.

Secondly, I would not support this for presidents. We’d see a recall effort for every president starting on Jan 21 of the year after every elections.

Senators? Maybe. I’m generally not supportive of “do overs”, but if you think they should be subject to recall, make your case. I’m open to being persuaded.

4

Thanks Alexa!

5
  1. How do you convince our government to slit its own throat, either at a Constitutional Convention or by the adding of an amendment?
  2. Can you even begin to estimate the cost, in time and money, of nonstop recalls and reelections?
6

  1. I did say “relatively” easy. The reason I mentioned a Convention is because any amendment in Congress would be D.O.A. because it would affect the people there. An amendment through a Convention would fall to state legislators who are *already subject to recall elections.

  2. I’m sure anything that gets passed would be conditional, requiring X number of signatures. I don’t have time to research before I leave for work, but I would be willing to bet that’s the case for local recall elections, which is why we don’t see them often. To set a relatively high bar, make it percentage based, e.g., 25% of their constituents petitioning for recall triggers the recall election. For federal politicians this would involve hundreds of thousands to millions of people.

As for expense; they finance their own campaigns, they can cover the cost of defending them. Ideally *all elections would be publically financed to remove the corrupting influence of money in politics, but that’s not the case now and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

7

It happens plenty. The government “slit its own throat” by allowing direct election of senators and the VP.

8

I say no. There would be constant, and I mean constant, campaigning going on for federal offices then. Once you won, you’d be spending every minute of your time defending your seat. You think money’s a problem in politics now? Sheesh. At least now us working stiffs have a couple years to re-load before we have to start giving again. If there were recalls always taking place, only the wealthy would have the money to provide funds for constant 24/7 campaigning, and that would definitely benefit one party over the other.