Necessary:  Wisconsin Recalls 

by O. Ricardo Pimentel

Those who follow or practice politics sometimes get presented with a choice: Be for "good government" or for a desired or desirable outcome. But it's often a false choice - as if a good outcome can't also be good government.

This is ostensibly the "choice" many Wisconsinites will be facing with our upcoming spate of recall elections, the spawn of the Legislature's successful trouncing of collective bargaining.

Good-government types - editorial boards and academics, usually, and those targeted by recalls, always - will see these as an assault on the orderly process that we call representative democracy, though the words "orderly" and "representative democracy" in the same sentence defy the laws of political physics. About process in any case.

Every two or four years, regularly scheduled elections already hold legislators and state constitutional officers accountable, goes the standard argument. Recalls should be reserved for acts of malfeasance, not for simply casting a disagreeable vote.

I buy that. An intelligent electorate will reserve recall elections for only those times and offenses that warrant them. They are warranted now.

Not because legislators' votes showed up in an "aye" or "no" column but for the duplicity with which these votes were conducted.

What the Republican majority perpetrated in Madison was a flimflam, tantamount to malfeasance. What the absconding Senate Democrats did was their job - yes, by not doing it.

Read more here:  http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/118271724.html