Putting appointed officials aside for now. If the voters put them in and they pull a bait and switch, why shouldn’t they be capable of being recalled? I would assume it would need a higher threshold than just the normal vote, similar to impeachment.
A good example is Fetterman. He’s completely done a 180 and not what the people voted for, yet as I understand it, Congress-critters can’t be recalled.
In the United States, it’s simple: the Constitution does not lay out any provision for such a recall. For better or worse, and it’s most certainly worse right now, the only way the removal of a person in Congress can happen is if the respective body itself expels the person (Senators to remove a Senator, House to remove a Representative), the person resigns, or the person dies. And expulsion has a fairly high bar to overcome.
Santos was expelled in '23 and another person in '02. It gets used, but the vast majority of the time the person who would get expelled resigns before they can be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_from_the_United_States_Congress
The excuse for places that don’t have it is often:
If voters could recall politicians, they’d recall politicians!
Which is enough when politicians are the only ones who can change it.
I have sometimes wondered: instead of elections, what if we could register a vote, which we could change any time? This might not have been feasible with paper ballots, but in an age of increasing digitalization, this should work.
I do see the downside though that most coalitions would only last a couple of months as majorities shift.
Another idea: A website where people can directly vote on issues, no representatives needed.
A good example is Fetterman.
I think the problem isn’t Fetterman so much as it is The Senate. Six year terms, expensive high stakes statewide elections, comically disproportionate representation by population size, and the smaller house giving a single bad actor disproportionate power to fuck with legislation.
You could point to Rand Paul or Joe Manchin or Ted Cruz just as easily. They all have a reputation for fucking with the popular consensus through arcane procedures and toxic personal ideologies.
A recall has the potential to remove a single bad actor in a single state and replace them with… what? Another bad actor? If you flipped out Fetterman for Memet Oz, would you be any happier? Meanwhile, the problem of the Senate is still embedded in the national political structure.
What we really need is an Article Five convention, to restructure a centuries-outdated and anti-democratic federal system in its entirety.
In Canada you can recall elected officials (although difficult to actually pull off), so it’s crazy to me that in the US there’s no mechanism to do so?
