Please see my post #21. I’d be interested in your thoughts, especially on the problem I just realized exists when having the voters of a state, with a recall provision in its Constitution similar to that of NJ, attempt to recall a US Senator who was voted on and elected to office by the State’s Legislature.
Thanks.
Well, since the U.S. Constitution supersedes any state one (in this case, with respect to election laws and explicitly recall initiatives), federal elected officials are exempt from recall. It would require an amendment to the Constitution to change this.
The argument many make with respect to recalling elected officials from top to bottom is that it tends to bring us closer to a parliamentary system. Since that already existed in the UK at the founding of our country, it was a system the Founders didn’t want us to explicitly follow.
At the time, the belief that set two-year terms for House members (and often just 1-year terms for legislators at the time of our founding) would be timely enough to meet the needs of the voting public (as I mentioned above, that despite Senators being elected for fixed 6-year terms, there was a gentleman’s agreement of sorts that the Senators would serve only so long as they voted how the legislature instructed them. If, for example, there was a switchover from a Federalist state legislative majority to a Jeffersonian Republican one (or vice versa), the member elected from the prior majority would step down in favor of a member reflecting the new majority).
Had it remained that way, we might have had less of a problem with Senators, but that really went out the window in the early to mid 1800s. Once elected, they realized they could choose to ride out their term to the end, regardless of any turnover at the state legislative level. Sometimes, they became isolated. A prime example was Black Republican Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi. He was elected to the Senate by a Republican body in 1875. The Democrats won it back by the next election and elected one of theirs (in this case, Lucius Q.C. Lamar, Jr.) in 1877. They (Dems) demanded the “Negro” get out of the other seat so they could elect one of theirs. Bruce by then had had to flee Mississippi to Washington, DC, but refused to resign, holding on until his term expired in 1881. He could use the argument he was duly elected to a 6-year term, which he was, and that was pretty much what everyone claimed and has ever since.