A quote wrongly attributed to President Abraham Lincoln says, “God must love the common man, for he made so many of them”. The same could be said for stupid politicians. Here in South Florida, we have far over our quota.
As most of you know there is a recall effort underway to yank Crazy Joe Carollo from office. It’s a complicated process, requiring the gathering of signatures in a first round, a check of those signatures and if there are enough, the City prints new petitions with a defense from the affected public official, and the organizers have to start all over again and collect even more signatures.
It’s all clearly laid out in the Florida Statutes. Every municipality in the State of Florida is required to use that same procedure, whether it’s Malabar or Miami. There can be no deviation and towns and cities aren’t free to add on any do-dads, like kids pinning playing cards to the wheels of their bikes.
We have one system to rule them all. Except, apparently, in Miami.
City Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla is bringing forth Ordinance Number 7222 which will limit the rights of City residents to a single attempt per year to recall City Commissioners and the Mayor. State law already prohibits a recall effort in the first one-fourth of an official’s term.
So, a Commissioner with a four-year term can’t be recalled in his or her first year. State law puts no restrictions or qualifiers after that first one-fourth of the term.
But Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla wants to create one just for the City of Miami. Why?
Maybe it’s because he knows that his buddy Revoltin’ Joe is only going to keep acting in a way that will keep the public outraged and demanding his departure from office. But AAlex can’t admit that. The truth hurts.
Alex beats his breast and makes good government noises. He calls recall elections unfunded mandates from the Florida Legislature, especially when they fail in the first round. But he knows that’s untrue.
The recall organizers have to pay to have the first set of petitions printed up and they’re responsible for the cost of signature verification charged by the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections. It is only when the organizers gather enough signatures in the first round that the City has to expend any money. And even then, it’s just the cost of Xeroxing a new stack of petitions.
Then the second batch of petitions go back to the Elections Supervisor who has to verify that enough signatures were collected and the cost of that is again paid by the organizers. If there are enough signatures to trigger an election, the target of the recall can resign and spare the City the cost of the election.
If the official insists on taking it to vote, which is the politician’s right, then the City is required to open the municipal checkbook.
Why ban multiple recall attempts? The research that I’ve done shows that there has never been multiple recall efforts against a Commissioner or the Mayor in the same year. Commissioner Alex is proposing a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
It may exist in the future, if a politician isn’t recalled and takes the failure to remove him or her as a blessing from the gods of corruption that anything done in the next year is immune from any remedy.
Short of an indictment from the U.S. Attorney or the State Attorney’s Office, the public official is free to commit all the misfeasance, malfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or conviction of a felony involving moral turpitude.
The real key will be whether City Attorney Victoria Mendez has the temerity to do what good lawyers do — tell their client what they want to do is illegal. That’s what this would be. Any attempt to add qualifications and provisos to an area preempted by State law would be struck down by the Florida courts, including the Florida Supreme Court, in a Miami minute.
But here’s something that City Attorney Mendez could do. She could ask the Florida Attorney General to issue an opinion. She could do this on her own. She could do this at the behest of a majority of the City Commission. She could even do it on behalf of a single Commissioner. It’s conceivable that Mayor Francis Suarez could even make a request for an AG opinion.
And since Alex Diaz de la Portilla is so set on saving the City money, even he would have to admit that a 55 cent stamp on a letter to the Attorney General is less that the hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be spent on an ordinance prompted by vanity rather than a real problem.
Asking for advice would be a way to educate our overabundance of stupid politicians.
