Power In the People's Hands
We have a true remedy now for failing politicians
Louisiana took its medicine today and our entire political system will be all the healthier for it.
The Louisiana House Government Affairs Committee today advanced a revised formula for determining the number of signatures needed to recall a failing official.
As we all realized during the doomed recall effort of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, it’s not merely unrealistic and unwieldy to set a signature target based on the number of voters on the rolls - the rolls are always wrong, but let’s set that aside for a moment - but it’s an injustice to set the signature target that way, creating a situation where a greater number of people would need to request that recall than voted in the election of that official.
Indeed, time and again, any effort to recall an official in this state has been squashed by the impossibility of the task.
No longer.
Pending a few more legislative steps that are anticipated to go our way in the state’s veto-proof, majority Republican legislature…
… moving forward, the number of signatures needed to trigger a recall will be 30% of the number of participants - the number of people who voted - in the election of the failing official.
This is a knowable, firm, factual number: How many people voted? Ok… 30% of that.
Let’s consider the greatest potential abuse of this new formula: “Tyranny of the Minority.”
Imagine a very contentious race between two fierce political opponents. What’s to stop the loser from organizing his supporters to recall the winner? The committee discussed this point at length and proposed an amendment that prohibited recall in the first year after swearing in. This timeframe is simply too long, however, as the recall could not be initiated until that year expires, then add six months to collect signatures, add time to validate the signatures, then the governor would order a recall setting the date at the next upcoming election… in other words, it could be nearly two years before a failed official goes up for a recall vote.
The general consensus is that a recall is, even with this new formula, a great undertaking that occurs only with serious cause. There are enough natural barriers to prevent the abuse of recalls, even with the new formula, a lower threshold to trigger the recall.
The overall discussion lasted 90 minutes and the vote, 10-3, came down to Republican -vs- Democrats, with all 3 Democrats voting against this healthy and much-needed remedy. (No surprise there, right?)
This is a “game changing” development in Louisiana political history.
‘We The People’ have an enforcement mechanism now at our disposal; we have a corrective; we voters have leverage.
Note that a recall does not automatically mean an official is removed from office, simply that citizens need to put that individual back under scrutiny, put them up for reconsideration by the voters, allowing us real input when an elected official abuses his position or otherwise gravely fails to represent our will as citizens.
All credit to the conservative activists of the Home Defense Foundation and especially to the work of Representative Paul Hollis of Covington who wrote and presented this bill to the committee.
Email him a ‘thank you’ if you like: hollisp@legis.la.gov
Friends, this won’t fix it all… nothing can. But we took a big step toward better governance in our state today.
A very good day, indeed!
And THANK YOU to each of you who emailed the legislators who sit on this committee: your efforts made a dramatic difference to the outcome.