A truly bad idea

Historian Robert Dallek proposed a new amendment to establish a recall procedure for failed and unpopular presidents, as he thinks President Bush is.

Such an amendment would need to set a high bar for removal and include a process that would be the greatest possible expression of the popular will. This could best be achieved through a recall procedure beginning in the House and the Senate, where a 60 percent vote would be required in both chambers to initiate a national referendum that would be open to all citizens eligible to vote in state elections. The ballot would simply ask voters to say yes or no to removing the president and vice president from office immediately. Should a majority vote to recall both incumbents, the speaker of the House would succeed to the presidency and, under the provisions of the 25th Amendment, would choose a vice president, who would need to be confirmed by majorities in the House and the Senate.

While I think that it would be near impossible to get a 60% vote in both chambers to oust a president unless the opposite party had such a majority, I still think that this would be a rotten idea. We do not have a parliamentary system where a leader is ousted when he loses the confidence of the public. Some presidents are unpopular in their own time, but history has redeemed their reputations. Dallek provides the example of Harry Truman, and I can think of others such as John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, or Herbert Hoover who might have been unpopular enough to have sparked recall procedures during their presidencies. Would the tough times that these presidents faced have benefited from the uncertainties of their facing a recall challenge? And imagine the partisan ugliness that could spark such challenges when the Speaker of the House is of a different party than the president. It's bad enough now, but if you added in a power grab by the Speaker for the presidency, it would become even more poisonous. Do we really want to replace the person elected constitutionally through a majority of electoral votes with a House representative elected only his or her district and then raised to being Speaker by other representatives? Think of some of the House Speakers that we have had in our history. Few, if any of them, had the appeal to be elected president themselves. The skills that leads party members to select someone to be Speaker are not necessarily those that would make a good president. The only president who was a former House Speaker was James K. Polk. And, in my opinion, the only other one who was qualified to be president was Henry Clay. Republicans would shudder at the idea of a President Pelosi or O'Neill and Democrats would have had the same reaction for a potential President Gingrich or Hastert.

So, let's allow the idea of a presidential recall amendment die a natural death in the pages of the Washington Post. No matter how much you dislike a particular president, we wouldn't be improving anything by introducing the idea of a recall to hang over the head of every president and to spark the ambitions of every Speaker of the House.