Calling For A Recall
The Chicago Tribune, in an unsigned editorial, is calling for the Illinois legislature to enact a recall provision to enable the voters to remove a politician who is not meeting the needs of the voters. The purpose: to throw Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich out of office.
The National Conference of State Legislatures offers a succinct summary of how a recall provision would be useful in a predicament such as Illinois': "Proponents of the recall maintain that it provides a way for citizens to retain control over elected officials who are not representing the best interests of their constituents, or who are unresponsive or incompetent. This view holds that an elected representative is an agent, a servant and not a master." (The NCSL takes no position on whether states should have recall provisions.)
This serious mechanism is rarely used. Only two U.S. governors have been recalled. North Dakotans ousted Lynn Frazier in 1921. In 2003, Californians voted to remove Gray Davis and, in a separate ballot measure, selected Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace him…….
…….The bill of particulars against Rod Blagojevich is numbingly familiar. His is a legacy of federal and state investigations of alleged cronyism and corruption in the steering of pension fund investments to political donors, in the subversion of state hiring laws, in the awarding of state contracts, in matters as personal as that mysterious $1,500 check made out to the governor's then-7-year-old daughter by a friend whose wife had been awarded a state job.
Presented this year with an extraordinary opportunity — his Democratic Party controlling both houses of the Illinois General Assembly — Blagojevich has squandered what should have been a leadership moment: He is governor of a state in desperate need of more accountability in its public schools, of a new tax formula for funding those schools, of a meaningful attack on its swelling pension indebtedness. Today Illinois has … solutions to none of the above.
Instead, taxpayers are bankrolling an endless game of chicken between legislative leaders and a governor known to boast about his self-diagnosed "testicular virility." Blagojevich has clumsily tried to recast himself as a prairie populist, bashing his state's employers. He has borrowed from the future to cover costs of state government today. And in a fiasco that may have its own constitutional implications, he has redirected millions of taxpayers' dollars to personal priorities that he can't convince lawmakers to support.
It sounds distressingly familiar, doesn't it? In fact it sounds rather a lot like what is happening in New York with Eliot Spitzer. Two of the biggest states being run by inept Democrats. The Tribune says that the odds of enacting a recall provision in time to do any good with Blagojevich are not great, but they want the legislature to get started on it.
By FedUp, Sunday, 28 October , 2007 @ 3:18 pm
And, next in line is Ed Rendell…
By Mwalimu Daudi, Sunday, 28 October , 2007 @ 4:55 pm
Call it the Clinton Effect - rewarding malfeasance, demagoguery and incompetence by electing and re-electing the Blagojevichs of the US political world over and over again. A recall is an effort to short-circuit what should be a well-deserved punishment of the voting public for going along with the fraud in the first place. Nor is a recall going to fix anything - the Schwarzenegger debacle has pretty much cured me that illusion.
I am for the absolute maximum punishment of voters and journalists with no possibility of parole. People dumb enough to vote for the likes of Blagojevich, Davis, Spitzer and Rendell should be held accountable by having the crooked, incompetent bozos they knowingly put in office serve their full terms - and after leaving office being forced to pay for generous pensions. Not to mention paying for the huge legislative and legal mess these governors leave behind.
While we are at it, let’s throw in generous pensions to all of the crooked trolls in their administrations. To rub salt in the wound, give a double portion to anyone who managed to get convicted of a crime (William Jefferson Clinton is the model here). Do that enough times, and maybe folks like Blagojevich won’t get into public office in the first place. “Hundreds of times bitten – finally at long last shy” should be the goal here.