Impeachment efforts must be limited or they will become undemocratic

Once again, and for the second time in less than 18 months in office, efforts to remove the Los Angeles County Attorney have failed.

The Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters announced this week that a second proposal to impeach George Gascon did not get the 566,857 signatures needed to bring the case to a vote in November 2022.

This attempt was unsuccessful, despite about $8 million being invested in the campaign, allowing people to collect signatures at a large number of locations in the county; in addition to allowing 3.6 million letters to be sent out ready to be signed, but apparently most Angeleno residents chose to ignore them.

Recall that this is the second effort in less than 18 months since Gascon came to power, which immediately casts doubt on the intentions.

Knowing that the effort began from the first day Gascon took the oath means that the intentions are purely political or have a different goal, but have nothing to do with the safety of the people, as was said from the very beginning.

At that moment there is already manipulation and, therefore, they lie and are dishonest in relation to the electorate, which should not be forgotten.

While the first attempt failed to convince people to sign the recall petition, the second attempt was backed up by significant money from people with political interests. But even so, the goals could not be achieved.

This should tell us a lot. First, people are not interested, do not want or just want democracy to be respected and allowed to work for Gascon at least long enough to see the results of his measures. But the fact of launching two campaigns in the official’s first 18 months should be enough to show that this is not a legitimate effort.

Let’s remember that in the first three years, there were five impeachment attempts against Gov. Gavin Newsom to finally get the ball rolling in September 2021, resulting in 61% of Californians finally confirming and supporting the governor.

The problem with all these efforts is that they were spent from the state treasury. about 300 million dollars to organize elections, money that could well be used to improve health during the pandemic, support small businesses and educational events, among other things.

In this sense, impeachment affects the interests of the majority of Californians who voted for the governor in 2018, and this is one of the problems.

This does not mean that we should exclude the possibility of being fired for any reason; But what should be done is to limit these efforts to two possible options for dismissing an official who, in the opinion of the group, is not doing his job or doing it poorly.

Unfortunately, this democratic exercise with the possibility of dismissing an official is used by interest groups. In the cases of Newsom and Gascon, conservative Republican groups — in many cases extremists, including supporters of Donald Trump — were implicated in both attempts.

I agree that they have such an opportunity, but we cannot allow this, because they have money, they can try to use this right again and again until they reach their goal. This is no longer a democracy.

Letting a group with money and a defined political agenda try to overturn a decision made by a majority of the people in a general election is another democratic exercise that we are all committed to, is not democracy; rather, it becomes a threat to democracy, since the goal is to change the decision of the majority in favor of the few.

That is why it is important to keep this democratic exercise, but limit it to no more than two options. I’m sure if the effort is legitimate, one option will suffice; but if this is not the case, it will take, as in the case of Newsom, up to five attempts or more to reverse the result obtained in the election.

At worst, there should be a period of one year between the impeachment attempt and the impeachment attempt, so as not to make this democratic event the exclusive tool of power groups that refuse to respect the decision of the majority.

That is why I emphasize that we must learn to defend solutions that come from democracy. And this, I think, will be one of them.

Agustin Durand is the local news editor for La Opinion in Los Angeles. Any comments or suggestions: [email protected] or tweet @agustinduranLA