Republican Utah Rep. Tim Quinn took a well-deserved shot at Utah Senator Mitt Romney. He put Romney on notice and introduced a bill that allows Utah voters to recall Senators.
Now, Quinn says that this is not aimed solely at Romney but that 6 years is a long time and he wants the Utah voters to have a remedy if they send a clown to Washington.
Term limits, recall initiatives, etc., all sound like a good idea if we want to take back our country rather than see it drown in the swamp.
First reported by Deseret News, the bill would create a process by which a recall vote could go on the ballot after a petition by voters.
“I know that’s what’s going to be the narrative,” Quinn told the Deseret News when asked if the bill was aimed at Romney, the sitting GOP senator whose current term doesn’t expire until 2025. “If it were, then it might make sense to have a sunset on it. That would not be the case.”
“Six years is a long time,” he said, according to the Deseret News.
Fox News reported that Mitt Romney has been under pressure from the GOP for his seeming willingness to buck Donald Trump, especially amid impeachment proceedings. Specifically, Romney has been open to hearing witnesses in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial at a time when most Republicans are in favor of a fast acquittal of the president.
The proposed bar for putting a recall vote on a ballot is quite high, requiring the signatures of 25 percent of “the number of active voters in the state.” Additionally, senators could not be recalled within the first year of their term, within a year of winning a recall election or within a year of the end of their term.
“Obviously I didn’t open this bill file after he made some of that news with impeachment, it would have never been drafted this quickly,” Quinn said. “So I can understand why people might think that, but if they understood the legislative process, this was well before that.”
The bill, HB217, would establish a process for legal voters to petition through signature gathering to place a question on the ballot to recall a U.S. senator.
Quinn said he sees the bill as a “good compromise between pre- and post-17th Amendment” that contains a fitting standards to meet for a recall.
“I think it’s a fairly large hurdle,” Quinn said. “That’s a lot of signature gathering. So it’s not something that people would take lightly if someone ever did want to recall a sitting senator.”
