Robert Dallek, in a special to the Washington Post (reprinted in the Kansas City Star on August 8, 2007), proposed the novel idea of amending the U.S. Constitution to provide for the recall of the President and Vice President through a super-majority vote in both the House and the Senate (60% needed to pass) and thence to a national referendum, in which a simple majority would suffice to remove both persons from office.  The Speaker of the House would then assume the duties of the President, and a new Vice-President would be seated under the protocol laid out by the 25th Amendment.

Mr. Dallek may be a historian of some note (the KC Star credits him as the author of the book "Nixon and Kissinger:  Partners in Power"), but this idea also marks him as a partisan power-grabber.  Dallek cites recent opinion polls giving Mr. Bush an approval rating of roughly 30%, but fails (conveniently) to cite equally recent polls that show the U.S. Congress with an approval rating in the 15-19% range.  Yet he wants the current leader of the House to become President under his recall proposal.  Right, THAT will re-instill confidence in the Executive Branch, you BETCHA.

Besides, his supermajority idea wouldn't get the job done anyway.  As it stands right now, partisan votes in the Senate  means that if a bill requires 60% to make it to the floor for a vote, it won't get there, because one side or the other can certainly muster 40 "nay" votes to block it.  Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter, the 60% simply isn't there, and that's only for normal bills.  There is NO WAY that the Senate would sign off on a recall vote to send the matter to a national referendum, and the closeness of the House means that the 60% supermajority can't be attained there any time soon either.

Mr. Dallek claims that his idea would serve to prod an unpopular Chief Executive into "abandoning policies or altering actions that had turned the country against him".  He also gives the two instances where states have turned out their sitting governors by means of recall, North Dakota's Lynn Frazier in 1921 and California's Gray Davis in 2003.  It seems to me that the option of turning a moribund President out of office by means of a 60% vote in the Congress and a 50% + 1 vote in the national referendum would be exercised much more often, given the unpopularity of some that have occupied that office and done little or nothing.

Andrew Johnson, the 17th President, barely survived an actual impeachment vote.  Had the recall option been available, President Johnson would certainly have been removed, and the Radical Republicans of the time would have moved even more quickly than they did to install their own man in the White House and plunder the defeated Southern states.  As it was, they did a nice job of it for the eight years of the Grant Administration.

Herbert Hoover would never have completed his only term in office had the recall been available in 1931.  After the stock market crash, the run on the banks, and the beginning of the Great Depression, his Presidency was dead, and the Congress and electorate would have been more than happy to turn on him as the scapegoat and run him out of the Oval Office.

How about the caretaker Presidents?  Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan...three examples of men who didn't do much to further the noble aims of this great nation.  There were others, of course, but those three come to mind fairly quickly, since their inattention or inability to act helped the run-up to the Civil War.

Finally, Jimmy Carter, to come back to more recent times.  This was the Administration for which the "misery index" was CREATED (unemployment plus interest rates plus inflation), and we had the Iran hostage situation on top of that.  Had the recall option been in place in 1979, Mr. Carter might have found himself back in Plains on the peanut farm a lot faster than he actually did.

Mr. Dallek is dissatisfied with the Constitutional method of removing a seated President or Vice-President, that of impeachment, and wants to speed up that process with a supermajority vote of both houses of Congress and a majority vote of the national electorate.  He also wishes to do away with the provision in the Constitution that impeachment can only take place with the proving to the satisfaction of a majority of the House and 2/3 of the Senate that the President or Vice-President be guilty of "high crimes or misdemeanors", and instead base their removal on popularity polls, which are only and always a snapshot in time of what people are feeling in that instant.  The Cold Hard Fact is that the Founding Fathers of this country provided the means to remove a sitting President or Vice-President, and they made it difficult to achieve that removal for a good reason.  The two impeachment trials in this history of this country both came back from the Senate with "not guilty" verdicts, and a President has never been removed from office by this means.  Proving wrongdoing is much more difficult than proving unpopularity, and "I don't like him" should not be considered a equal reason for removing a President or Vice-President with malfeasance or active law-breaking.  In this area, the Constitution does not need changing, and Mr. Dallek's propounded concept is shortsighted and partisan in the extreme.