Illinois Elected Offical Recalls

[HuskyCaucasian]

I havent seen a thread on this yet, so I thought I would bring it up.

 

ll. legislators move closer toward recall process

There is a movement in Springfield to amend the constitution to recall elected officials, much like the law in California. THose involved preety much admite that this is directly aimed at Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

 

Let's talk. I would argue we should talk about how this applies to Blogo, but we should focus on the larger picture: Should voters be allowed to remove an elected official if they believe he is doing a poor job or violated the public trust?

[Balta1701]

Let's talk. I would argue we should talk about how this applies to Blogo, but we should focus on the larger picture: Should voters be allowed to remove an elected official if they believe he is doing a poor job or violated the public trust?

In principle I think the concept makes sense.

 

But trust me though...in practice, this is just one path you don't want to follow California down. From setting up whatever sort of screwed up initiative process it will take to allow the recall to start to allowing people with big money in to finance the thing because of some specific law that was passed that cost them money, the whole system out here was a disaster.

Edited April 5, 2008 by Balta1701

[Gregory Pratt]

I think you elect someone, and then it's up until they either resign, are impeached-then-removed or die that they leave office. I think voter recalls are dangerous.

[Rex Kickass]

I think that voter recalls are alright, as long as they are very difficult to do. California's recall process is a little too easy in my opinion.

[EvilMonkey]

I agree in theory that it is a good option to have, but it should bea difficult, but not impossible, task to start. If the offending politician is truely bad enough to warrent it, it will happen. Make it too easy and it will just be another tool for people to abuse.

[Rex Kickass]

The truth is that if there is enough genuine cause for removal, and enough popular support to warrant it, impeachment happens in those cases. And it succeeds. (The best example of that was Nixon - because unlike Johnson in the 1860s and Clinton in the 1990s - the movement was grassroots based, and not insider politically motivated.)

[Balta1701]

I think Rex has the right idea.

 

If a government has done something so genuinely bad that the governor needs to be recalled, usually there's a violation of a bunch of laws somewhere, to the point where people are genuinely pissed, at which point the gov is going to be gone anyway.

 

But if a governor simply isn't liked, even after several years, because he's ineffective or because he's running bad policies out there, the recall is probably more trouble than its worth. I'll certainly throw California in this category, the recall was pretty much an expensive debacle that, while it succeeded, did absolutely nothing to help the state's problems, and probably made them worse.