Page:Recall of Legislators and the Removal of Members of Congress from Office.pdf/9

 chosen.” In New York, an amendment was defeated in the 1788 ratifying convention which would have allowed the state legislatures to “recall their Senators … and elect others in their stead.” In the ratifying debates in Virginia, George Mason commented: “The Senators are chosen for six years. They are not recallable for those six years, and are re-eligible at the end of the six years. …. They cannot be recalled in all that time for any misconduct.”

This history indicates an understanding of the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution that no right or power to recall a Senator or Representative from the United States Congress existed under the Constitution as ratified. As noted by an academic authority on the mechanisms of “direct democracy”: "The Constitutional Convention of 1787 considered but eventually rejected resolutions calling for this same type of recall [as provided in the Articles of Confederation]. … In the end, the idea of placing a recall provision in the Constitution died for lack of support—at least from those participating in the ratifying conventions. The framers and the ratifiers were consciously seeking to remedy what they viewed as the defects of the Articles of Confederation and some of their state constitutions, and for many of them this meant retreating from an excess of democracy."

Another constitutional scholar explained that the formation of the United States government as a distinct, sovereign entity was unlike the former confederation, and the former Continental Congress created by the Articles of Confederation where the colonial legislatures selected the delegates for the state/colony and could “instruct and recall them,” such as a sovereign state could do with its ambassador to another country or to a multinational entity. Once the Union was formed in 1788 upon the ratification by the 9th state, it became clear that Members of Congress were no longer merely “ambassadors” from states coming together by treaty or confederation—and who thus could be recalled by their constituent entities—but rather were new officers of the newly formed national government, that is, officers of the United States. Rh