Ozzy goes for the Big Brass Ring
We can all breath a collective sigh of relief. Apparently, we’re saved. A couple of courts have decreed that the recall election is going to the ballot, and we’ve also just been advised that political help may be on its way.
Rocker Ozzy Osbourne has decided to announce his candidacy for governorship of California.
Osbourne, heavy metal legend, well-known bat fancier, alleged occasional Satanist and, lately, superstar of an updated version of the “Ozzie and Harriet” TV show, was alleged to have announced in his own particularly pithy fashion that “I can simply do a better f***ing job than Davis. If I can bite off the head of a live bat, then I can take a bite out of this f***ing state deficit.”
The governor’s office, struggling to respond to that rather direct and action-orientated campaign opening, had no comment other than to imply that Osbourne follows in a long tradition of other “also ran” Republican actors, including George Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, of course, Ronald Reagan, who jumped from entertainment to politics and then quickly sank back into obscurity.
However, I must add, having sat through a few of Gray Davis’ speeches and press conferences, my belief is Osbourne would represent a step up in articulation from what we’ve become used to.
The irony of it all is that we, the citizens of California, may actually have an opportunity to recall the governor simply because we just don’t like him. However, we may not get a chance to pick his successor. It all hinges on two simple words-“if appropriate”-which are lodged in the California Constitution. The Constitution reads that once the recall qualifies, the lieutenant governor calls a replacement election and, “if appropriate,” a vote to elect a successor.
In order to figure out what all this means, you have to go back in history. In the early 1900s, the railroads virtually owned the state of California and with it, the state legislature. Nothing, nor anyone, went through that the railroads didn’t want. Corruption was rampant, and there was a popular revolution. Hiram Johnson and a bunch of other reformers managed to pass a number of pieces of liberalizing legislation, including citizen initiatives, referendums and recall. To make a recall easier, they set the bar very low, requiring that only 10 percent of the voting electorate were needed to sign the recall petitions.
So in the last governor’s election, when candidate Bill Simon got roughly 3.1 million votes and Davis got 3.4 million votes, it took only about one-third of Simon’s voters signing a recall petition to force it back to the voting booth.
The early reformers also made another decision early in the last century. There didn’t have to be any reason to recall an officeholder, merely that he or she was wanted out of office. They created something that was, really, similar to a parliamentary vote of “no confidence.”
It didn’t have to be done that way. Other states have recall, but only if there is a “high crime or misdemeanor” or “gross malfeasance in office” or similar language. But not in California. You can’t recall the president of the United States, but you can impeach him, if memory serves me, for high crimes and misdemeanors, but even then it’s not just a popularity contest. There must be grounds, and then he’s impeached in one house and tried in another.
So you can begin to see that recall is a draconian remedy. There are some serious and unknown legal and constitutional questions surrounding a recall. This is not the typical legal baloney we’ve heard so far about how quickly you count the ballots or similar such strategic fights.
This question goes to the very heart of our democracy. Ultimately, the California Supreme Court, I suspect, is going to have to decide it.
There are several clues that this is a serious legal question. For one thing, the recall folks have said that failure to have a replacement election would be a “serious abuse of power” and that it violates the wishes of the 1.6 million voters that signed the recall petitions. That’s actually true. It also means the recall folks are scared.
On the other hand, 3.4 million voters cast ballots to put Davis into office and they also have a right to have him for a full term. The courts also must think long and hard about this because this opens an entirely new battlefield in California elections that they might like to avoid in the future. So, you can see, this legal battle is just starting.
If I had to guess, I don’t see this election going forward as quickly as some of the recall proponents would like it to happen. And perhaps considering what’s at stake, that’s a good thing.
P.S. I’ve just learned that Ozzy Osbourne’s run for governor was just someone’s parody, which only goes to show how desperate we’ve all become that nothing sounds ridiculous anymore.
P.P.S Ozzy. Think it over. We need you.