The Permanent Election

By Robert B. Reich
The American Prospect
Issue Date: 9.1.03

One of the things that distinguishes advanced democracies from banana republics is that winners and losers accept the results of elections. Losing candidates and parties don't initiate coups. Winners don't kill off the losers and their supporters. The winning party has an opportunity to govern. Both sides go back to their respective corners -- winners take office, losers take other jobs -- and wait until the next election to do battle again.

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Exhibit One: Impeachment. Bill Clinton's Republican opponents sought to reverse the election of 1992 almost as soon as Clinton came to Washington.

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Exhibit Two: Election re-engineering. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush set out to overturn the will of a majority of American voters by rigging the voting system. It's by now well established that Florida officials purged from voter rolls thousands of people in the state who were guilty of nothing more than being black and likely to vote for Gore. Bush subsequently fought against a manual recount, taking his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where five of the nine justices, all Republican nominees, effectively ended it.

Exhibit Three: California's recall petition. Last fall's gubernatorial election may be undone on Oct. 7, when California voters return to the polls.

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In the permanent election, constitutional procedures -- impeachment, Supreme Court intervention and state recall -- designed to be used only in rare and extraordinary circumstances are used instead as political tools to reverse elections. In none of these recent instances did the original winner commit such wrongful acts that a large majority of the electorate clearly demanded the use of such emergency measures. Instead, rivals initiated them for unambiguously partisan purposes.

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