States promote recall power

The nation's governors and state legislators convened a bipartisan ' federalism summit" in Cincinnati last month, with more than 300 leaders from 50 states gathering to assess the current operation of the federal system and review ways to fix it.

The summit's background papers clearly and correctly identified the problems. First, the federal government has grown too big, too costly and too intrusive.

Second, the expansion of the federal government beyond the intent of the Framers has been aided and abetted by a federal Supreme Court that has consistently favored the expansion of federal power at the expense of the states and the sovereignty of the people.

Third, federal overreach has led to fiscal irresponsibility. The federal government has not balanced its budget for 27 years, and only eight times since the end of World War II. Federal debt now exceeds $4 trillion while federal mandates have distorted state and local priorities by requiring new spending and staffing by state and local bureaucracies to carry out federal mandates for everything from rodent control to elder care.

Fourth, state governments, included by the Framers as corporate participants in federal policy-making, were eliminated as a check on federal power by the 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of senators. Does anyone believe we would have unfunded mandates if U.S. senators were still appointed by state legislatures?

The Cincinnati summit showed less consensus about how to fix things as members reviewed a range of statutory and constitutional options. Because statutory approaches to relimit the federal government and rebalance the federal system are easily repealed when political winds shift, many participants lean toward constitution approaches.

The most compelling constitutional approach was proposed by Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a summit leader, who proposed what he calls "people's legislative recall." Legislative recall would allow the people of the U.S., through a "petition of disapproval" passed by two-thirds (or three-fifths or some other supermajority) of state legislatures, to compel Congress to vote again to pass a disapproved statute or regulation (except those relating to national defense or foreign affairs) before it can become the law of the land.

Leavitt's recall proposal is a form of "state veto" or nullification, which has a long history in intergovernmental politics. The idea that states should have the power to recall an act of Congress goes back to the beginning of the republic, when it was invoked by Founders James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to protect civil liberties and roll back the hated Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

Recall was invoked again by John C. Calhoun during the presidency of Andrew Jackson to quash unbalanced economic policies -- specifically to nullify protective tariffs that Southern politicians felt favored the industrial New England states at the expense of the agricultural states of the South.

Legislative recall emerged a third time in the 1850s as "popular sovereignty" -- the idea that states could decide whether to be free states or slave states, regardless of deals to the contrary struck by members of Congress.

Forms of legislative recall have been advanced by several governors and by state legislators. These are sound ideas and deserve further consideration. Reason: They involve principle-centered solutions to a government that is out of control, and they restore to the idea of "national" government the corporate representation of states, a check intended by the Framers.