Today's Recall Election: A Warning to the Future
Oh yes: you probably do not know this, unless you read all of the papers. (And if you do read all the papers, that means you got to enjoy "Recall election could trigger change," a real doozy from the Herald, though they also have this brisk and informative thing for those unfamiliar. Trigger change! It sure could. Or could not. Anyway!) Today the mayor of Miami and also a Miami-Dade county commissioner are up for a recall vote, which is notably the work of one man. One billionaire, no less: Norman Braman. Now… the squeaky thing here is: he's right! There should be an ability to recall these people. And also there should be crazy things like "term limits" and fewer people ransacking the county, which is Braman's agenda. And then there is absolutely no discussion of who comes next: there's a monster-sized vacuum for a monster to pop up in. Given the scope of the pro-privatization, "anti-tax," right-wing-funded political candidate training going on in the country, the rash of recalls we'll likely see over the next year have the same problem. The post-recall elections are wide-open to anyone with the funding to run. And you know who's got the money.
Strongly disagree on term limits? They haven't done California any favors! You end up with people who are there for 6 or 8 years who know so, so much less than the lobbyists and bureaucrats who have no term limits, and who therefore more or less do what they're told!
Don't term limits technically subvert "the will of the people" (to the extent that such a thing exists at all)? If I want to vote for Incumbent A, but he can't run due to term limits, there's something the matter there, right?
I've always thought that scrapping term limits would improve politics somewhat. With the presidency, for instance, all that matters is not being a one-termer, so they play it safe in the first term, maybe get something done in the first two years of the second, and then spend the last two as a lame duck. Without term limits, they could be getting stuff done all the time – and running on their records instead of away from them.
Uh
No.
I am not against term limits across the board, but voters in Miami-Dade tend to be quite, uh, disengaged and uninformed that they basically vote for whatever name they recognize most. We may get one decent commissioners who has a long reign for every five horribly corrupt ones.
Term limits are a great idea. Just ask Bloomberg.
I was getting ready for a race war, but it's gonna be a class war? LETS DO IIIIIIT
This Cuban-American Republican is just going to get replaced by another Cuban-American Republican (as of right now, likely Hialeah mayor Julio Robaina) and nothing is really going to change except, possibly, lower property tax rates in the short run.