Michael Moore: ‘punish Connecticut’ (plus: can you recall a Senator?)
… for electing Joe Lieberman. The filmmaker Tweeted for a boycott of the state unless it initiates a recall of the duplicitous Indepdent Senator, who it’s clear will pay no price for gutting healthcare reform on behalf of his state’s key industry. Moore probably should have Googled before he hit “update,” however (as should Rep. Rosa DeLauro) since Connecticut has no law on its books that would enable such a thing, and even it did, it’s not clear that it would matter. (Eighteen states do have recall laws on the books, including Moore’s home state of Michigan.) More on that after the jump. Meanwhile, fellow members of the CT caucus are reportedly sick of Lieberman, too. And I spoke this afternoon with a staffer to another member of Congress who said that a change seems to be taking place inside the Lieberman camp, from a sense of triumphalism at the top of the week, to a sense of near dread now, as the fury at “Joe the bummah” escalates …
So, upon learning of his error, Moore updates (or is that “uptweets?” … but does he still get it wrong?
Guess I’m spoiled living in Mich. where we can recall our state pols. Can’t do that in CT. And NO state can recall their US Sen! Democracy!
So which is it — can those 18 states recall their Senator(s) or not? Well … Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin do have recall laws, and there’s a popular link going around that explains how such a recall could be done. However, it’s not at all clear that those laws are constitutional, and since it’s never been done, in the history of the U.S., it’s never really been teted, either. There was a brief effort mounted in 2001 to recall Lieberman’s buddy John McCain, ironically, because he was not being sufficiently slavish to the man who beat him in the 1999/2000 primaries: Connecticut yankee (with a faux Texas twist) George W. Bush. At the time, Constitutional law expert Bruce Ackerman, a professor at Connecticut’s Yale law school, knocked down the notion, via a letter to the New York Times:
A few years ago, the Supreme Court struck down state laws imposing term limits on members of the House of Representatives. A similar logic applies to the attempt by states to alter senatorial terms. Any effort to recall any senator is unconstitutional.
To add Connecticut insult to Connecticut irony, a report by the Congressional Research Service dating back to 2003, which expands further on the unconstitutionality of attempts to recall federal lawmakers, can be found in the archives of the Senate website of one Joe Lieberman. See for yourself here (or download here.) So assuming he read the report, Joe knows he’s not going anywhere (until, perhaps, he gets that plum insurance industry job Olbermann talked about tonight…) or unless the voters of the nutmeg state boycott him in 2012.
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Moore’s an idiot, a propagandist, and an opportunist! Anything out of his mouth is simply meant to generate $ for himself, and has no substance beneath this thin, superficial motive.