Wisconsin recalls are a loss for democracy
By Brian Schoeneman | Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 | Politics“NO DO-OVERS!”
We used to yell that on the playground when we’d figure out the rules for a game of kick-ball. Playground etiquette demanded that the guy who brought the ball got to make the rules, and you can guarantee that at some point when he was chanting out the list of rules for the game, he’d end it with “no do-overs!” Kids understand that it’s not fair to give somebody two bites at the apple. You’re at the plate, you get one chance at the ball. If you screw up, you wait until it’s your turn to go again. That’s fair.
But in 18 states, including Wisconsin, that rule has been abandoned for political elections. Those states have adopted the recall election, where the people get a second chance if they think they’ve made a mistake and want to remove an elected official and replace them with another in mid-term.
As my colleague Ken Falkenstein has noted, yesterday was the recall election for six Republican state senators in Wisconsin. The GOP managed to stave off the attempted recalls in four of the races, with two races being lost. Ken attributes the loss in one to outside factors and the other to the political nature of the district. I don’t want to dismiss those two losses because I think they’re major blows – not to the GOP alone, but to democracy as a whole.
Recall elections are inherently anti-democratic devices. I don’t like them and I think, in general, they’ve been a destabilizing force in politics, not the populist power-to-the-people kind of force supporters claim them to be. While the recall concept has existed as early as ancient Greece, it didn’t spread in the United States until the Progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even then, it has only made it to 18 states for state level elections. This same movement brought us the direct primary, the referendum, the ballot initiative and the 17th Amendment to the Constitution providing for direct election of Senators. Of all of them, recalls remain the most controversial. And for good reason.
Put simply, recalls are a bad idea. Elections are a big deal. We shouldn’t be handing out mulligans when voters decide they made a mistake. That’s what the next election is for.
Elections have to mean something. If not, they lose their importance. It’s difficult enough getting folks to focus on elections today, given the complexity of our lives in the early 21st century. If folks know they’ve got an out – that if an elected official really screws up they can just remove him at will, the desire to get it right the first time and elect the right person on election day fades away.
And, conversely, the willingness of the elected official to do the right thing, especially if doing the right thing is unpopular, drops off dramatically as well. It forces politicians to abandon their better judgment and simply vote for everything popular and make no hard choices. That kind of behavior has led, at the federal level, to bloated government and a mountain of debt. No politician is willing to say no to more spending or to say yes to a tax increase knowing that both are equally unpopular. And that’s right now – in a country where there are no recall elections at the federal level and only 18 states have adopted them at the local level. Can you imagine what would happen if we had recall elections for federal office? It would be election day every month. And you’d see paralysis of a worse kind than what we already have – you’ll have elected officials refusing to make even the easiest decisions without taking a poll first. That’s no way to run a railroad.
Regardless of whether the Wisconsin recall elections were justified – even for the guy who cheated on his wife – I would have preferred that none of them happen. Not for the Republicans and not for the Democrats. Instead, I want to see a greater attention paid by we, the voters, on who we choose to represent us. Nowadays, just getting voters to pay attention for a few seconds to an election is a difficult feat, something I can attest to from personal experience out campaigning. If we remove the only incentive folks have to getting things right – the fact that you’re stuck with your choice for at least a couple of years – we’re only going to make things worse, not better.
The loss of two Republicans to recall elections last night was a loss for democracy as a whole. And if Republicans are successful in recalling two Democratic Senators next week, that “success” is also a failure. Elections need to matter and they don’t when we give ourselves do-overs.
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About the author
A veteran political professional, a long-time Republican party activist and new attorney, Brian W. Schoeneman has been offering his opinions at Bearing Drift since 2010. He serves on the Board of Virginia Line Media, LLC, which operates Bearing Drift and spends his days representing the U.S. Merchant Marine in Washington, D.C. He hails from Fairfax County, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and son.
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11 Responses to "Wisconsin recalls are a loss for democracy"
Brian,
You are absolutely right. If there is a rogue official there are always legal and impeachment avenues to try first. The threshold for a recall should be very high – say 60% of the state voter turnout in the last prez election. The idea of having “elections” every 3 months because some partisan group thinks the polls that week favor them is a behavior that should be condemned and stopped.
Amen, Brian. One more step towards the direct democracy our Founding Fathers detested and feared.
I completely disagree – We, The People have every right – and yes, even the DUTY to replace people who are abusing their elected offices or who have lost the support of their constituents.
It is utter foolishness to let someone keep doing harm when they have proven they can no longer be trusted to serve the interests of the people that elect them.
Winning an election isn’t a 4 year or 2 year license to do whatever the heck you want – people are allowed to SERVE their constituents and the folks PAYING for the government are more than proper to FIRE poor performers and replace them with better representatives.
Reid,
What about impeachment or the legal system is not available to remove malefactors? Poor performance is necessarily subjective and changes over time. What is poor performance to you is probably fine and dandy to a leftist. Reagan would have been fired in 1982 just when his policies were starting to work. California recalled Gray Davis and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger. All that commotion produced what exactly? You are just guaranteeing perpetual warfare where nothing gets done and the economy is shattered even when the best people are in office. If voters are going to be foolish about the people they elect no recall system is going to correct that.
Actually, we have entered into a true democracy…the blow is actually to the Republic to where the mob dominates individual rights. Even some Republicans paint individual rights as selfish but hell is when the only dissenting vote is hanging off the end of a rope. Especially when community organizers are ruling the nests.
With our media full of propaganda, politicians full of lies and our political pundits full of other stuff, it’s bad when ordinary people get slammed for wanting a government to spend less than what it takes in. There won’t be too many people pay attention.
It’s difficult to see what’s going on with so much crisis happening. Which issue should we pay attention too?
Valentinus, I’ll be obnoxious here and answer your question with a question – What is not right about voters removing malefactors?
The point is that winning an election doesn’t mean a person that, once elected, upsets the MAJORITY of his constituents has some strange sort of diplomatic immunity and can’t be fired by the people they work for – that being their constituents.
Recall is a very GOOD thing for putting an end to failed representation in a more timely and expeditious manner.
Impeachment? Who can trust the politicians to do their duty? They have demonstrated their failure time and time again.
The “legal system” ??? You can’t be serious? The legal system is a system designed to protect the scoundrels not to actually serve the taxpayers.
Who writes the laws? Well, lobbyists and lawyers – and then politicians and their staff “tweak” the language of the bills. Given that politicians are allowed to craft the LAW – and the “legal system: is required to adhere to the LAW, only a naive fool would trust the “legal system” to act expeditiously to remove bad elected representatives.
Recall is a VERY good idea. It puts the power back in the hands of the electorate and outside the cozy and incestuous self-preservation society of the political class.
Brian,
Your position is logical and well-stated, as always. However, recall elections are not necessarily anti-democratic. It depends on the nature of your political system. In a parliamentary form of democracy, the entire government and the legislature can be thrown into new elections by a simple vote of “no-confidence.” This allows for the voters to re-think their previous support based on a single political controversy. On the other hand, in a fixed term representative democracy, elections are strictly scheduled and the elected representatives have certain knowledge of when they must stand before the voters again. In this regard, the recall is a perversion of the political system since it changes the rules in mid-play. Instead of voting their conscience and principles on a major issue, fixed term elected representatives must be wary of the momentary shifting of popular opinion.
And this brings me to my favorite subject: term limits. Without term limits, fixed term elected representatives devolve into a combination of the worst of both political systems. They become elected representatives who must measure every major vote against the popular opinion that will decide the next election. And the longer their tenure grows, the higher the stakes for each re-election becomes.
I cannot reconcile how anyone can both reject the recall of fixed term elected representatives and term limits. You can’t have it both ways. If your elected term is defined and fixed, then the number of terms cannot be unlimited. Otherwise, the elected representative serves to ensure his constant re-election at the expense of taking principled positions. And that is no way to run a railroad.
Reid, why should we be making these kinds of decisions when we’re angry? How many times have we’ve seen politicians make tough decisions that were unpopular that turned out okay? The most obvious I can think of was George H.W. Bush raising taxes. That cost him the election in 1992, and things turned out just fine. Had we kept him instead of dumping him, we might have been able to avoid impeachment and the other embarrassments of the Clinton era.
One bad decision or one unpopular decision shouldn’t be enough to cost a legislator his job. He’s being elected to use his judgment, not to be a rubber stamp for whatever his pollster says is popular. That’s not a good way to run a government.
If a legislator breaks the law , he can be impeached. Otherwise, we should wait until the next election before throwing him out.
As far as George HW Bush not being re-elected there was the small matter of the 1990-91 recession, which although formally dated July 1990 through March 1991, wasn’t certifiably ended by NBER’s dating committee until a month after Clinton was elected. In the pre-internet era we didn’t compile, distribute and analyze data in near real time like we do today (plus politically sensitive employment lags economic recovery). The 1992 race truly was “The Economy Stupid” election.
Despite 8 years understudy of Reagan HW never channeled Reagan on economic issues — George W Bush even less so. George HW Bush lost reelection on economic issues, and George W Bush’s poor economic stewardship ensured Barack Obama’s backlash election (any electoral chance McCain/Palin had to win died that post-Lehman September 2008 night when Paulson and Bernanke met with Pelosi/Reid et. al. and requested TARP) and our country’s even worse subsequent economic performance.
It isn’t poly sci — it’s economics.
I think the problem with the recalls is not that they hurt democracy, but that they are democracy. That is what the Founders and most rational proponents of good government would reject. So, although I agree with your negative assessment, I would take issue with your terminology. A constitutional republic is designed in part to limit populism. I take issue with Mr. Greenmun’s assessment here. Unless criminal conduct is in play, there is a normal process of removal with regular elections. Direct democracy is not a desireable condition and will result in tyranny. Overly frequent elections might in some cases seem like a good remedy for a wayward politician, yet they are costly and distract people from the real need to choose their representatives wisely from the outset.
A system that allows voters a “do over” because they don’t like the way somebody voted is disruptive to our system.
I don’t like the way those Wisc. GOP senators voted, but they were there by the will of their constituencies, so t hey had a right to vote their beliefs.
Reid: We have other ways to deal with “malefactors.” There was no allegation that these legislators “abused” their office. They just voted wrong. They’re allowed to do that.
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