Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass should resign in disgrace, but it’s not worth trying to recall her

Since 1911, California voters have had the power to recall elected officials. It was meant for a time like this, when “indolent” and incompetent leaders are failing. The recall allowed citizens to quickly remove an officeholder and vote in a replacement at the same time.

But not so much any more, because there are so many failed politicians that they form a virtual lobby for themselves. In 2022, the legislature passed and the governor signed a new law to make recalls of local officials more difficult.

There can be no question that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has failed. She traveled out of the country days after being warned that extreme fire risk from high winds would threaten her city; she was posing for photos in Ghana while homes and businesses in the Palisades burned to the ground next to a city-owned reservoir that had no water in it. She hired an apparently incompetent CEO for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power at a sky-high salary of $750,000 per year and approved generous raises for civilian union city workers, then cut more than $17 million from the budget of the L.A. Fire Department. She refused to enforce an anti-camping ordinance that would have allowed the emergency removal of homeless encampments, known to be a severe fire hazard even without high winds.

The consequences have been grave and the damage is nearly incalculable.

Bass had already declared that she is running for re-election in 2026. She should not run for re-election. She should resign in disgrace.

But if she refuses to resign, if she continues to make happy-talk videos praising L.A. residents for being resilient, could she be recalled?

Perhaps not, because the failed-politician lobby in Sacramento made changes to the law controlling petitions for local recalls and, if they successfully qualify, the timeline for recall elections.

For starters, there is no longer a second question with a list of replacement candidates. Assembly Bill 2584 states, “The petition shall not include a request for a successor to be elected or appointed if the officer sought to be recalled is a local officer.” If a majority of voters say “yes” to the recall, the office is vacant. The City Council would choose a replacement to fill the vacancy.

AB 2584 quintupled the number of proponents needed on a recall petition. In a city with a population of 100,000 or more, the required “Notice of Intention” must include the names and residential addresses of 50 proponents, or five times the number of signatures required on nominating papers to run for the office, whichever is higher. To run for mayor of Los Angeles, 500 signatures are required with a filing fee, 1,000 signatures without one.

The law also created a 10-day public inspection period during which any voter may file a legal challenge to the stated reasons for the recall, seeking amendments or deletions. Also, the proponents can be sued for libel or slander.

And instead of requiring that a recall election take place promptly, it can be conducted any time within 180 days of the issuance of the order for the election. That allows recall elections to be consolidated with the next regularly scheduled election.

You may remember that when an effort was made to recall now-former L.A. County District Attorney George Gascon, the L.A. County Registrar’s office disqualified an unusually high number of signatures and said the recall didn’t have sufficient signatures to qualify.

Recall proponents had the legal right to review the rejected signatures and the reason for rejection. They found that many thousands of signatures were improperly tossed out and also that the voter roll was inflated.

The result? A new law, Senate Bill 1441 by Ben Allen, which sharply limits the time for signature reviews and requires the proponents to pay for them, likely hundreds of thousands of dollars in Los Angeles.

California’s worst political leaders are protected from recall by a rigged system. Just vote them out.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley