Imagine you are an employer and you have an employee you can’t fire. As long as they don’t do anything illegal, you simply don’t have the power to terminate them and must continue to pay them regardless of their job performance. Now imagine this employee has the responsibility of managing the entire business. Would you be entirely comfortable with that?
That’s the situation Wisconsin could be in soon. On Monday, a bill was proposed in the Wisconsin legislature that would make it impossible to recall an elected official unless they violate a civil or criminal law. This is, of course, in response to last June’s recall elections that threatened the seats of lawmakers in both parties. The idea behind the bill is recall elections are expensive and too often used for purely political reasons. While I agree, I think this bill is too extreme a measure as it limits government accountability. Fear of recall isn’t what motivates officials to do a good job, but having the ability to remove them for being morons is important for checks and balances of power. If they’re doing a bad job we should be able to get rid of them.
Currently, a recall requires one quarter of the number of people that voted in the election to sign a petition at least one year after the official took office. Perhaps raising this number to a third or higher could be reasonable. After all, any elected official in the country has people that want them out of office and 25 percent isn’t much. Holding a recall election every time a politician does something unpopular is just ridiculous. That being said, recall efforts require many people and a lot of hard work. Reaching a quarter of the electorate is much harder than it sounds, and recall elections are in fact very rare. I think the laws regarding recalls are fine as they are.
As I said before, recall elections are very expensive and overly political. This is also true, however, of everything our government ever does. Actually, a recall election only costs nine million dollars, which is really just less than three dollars per taxpayer. That is the cost of democracy. Three dollars.
This bill also doesn’t take into consideration the myriad deplorable and crooked things politicians are capable of that are perfectly legal, not to mention the illegal ones they just don’t get caught for. Now, I dig the whole “innocent until proven guilty” deal we’ve got going and don’t like to make any unfair assumptions, but let’s take a look at Governor Walker and his legal troubles. We have here a man with $200,000 in his legal defense fund and a lot of known illegal activity in his administration. Either the governor is completely out of touch with what the people close to him are doing or the man has a good reason to stock up on legal defense money. Even if the latter is true, $200,000 can buy some pretty solid lawyers and it is unlikely he’ll ever be nailed for something. Unfortunately, I believe this is the case with many elected officials and it would make the recall process really tricky if it required the official to be charged with anything.
This proposed bill defeats the entire purpose of the power of recall. The point of democracy is that the people are more powerful than our elected officials, and making it so that we can’t remove them from office throws off that hierarchy. Rarely is legislation that takes power away from the people a good thing.
Mitch is a freshman with an undecided major. What do you think about recall reform? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
