That's good lawmaking.

Engel had introduced LB878, which would have limited the recall of elected officials to instances when officials had broken the law or committed a bad deed, were negligent in the performance of their duties or flat-out failed to do the work. In legal terms, that's malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance you know, the Feasance Brothers, Bad, Wrong and Lazy.

Engel's proposal would have required a judge to decide without the benefit of evidence gathering whether a recall attempt fell under one of the three categories. Some lawmakers felt LB878 needlessly injected the courts into political and governmental relationships.

Motivating Engel was the usual ugliness surrounding recall attempts. You know the type: neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, families enduring whispers, shouts and a general nastiness.

Plus, while the events preceding recalls often fall under the malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance triumvirate, you and I both know that personalities play a large part in the civic exercise that falls somewhere under the First Amendment.

That can be daunting for elected officials, who can have bad hair one day and be on the block the next, a petition circulating around town questioning their comeliness.

Or fail to greet a constituent properly on the street, and you may be answering to charges of politically motivated snobbery.

Engel was right to tuck LB878 in his pocket, leaving the electing and recalling up to voters.

Lawful votes

Of course, using prostitutes would not only qualify as one of the deadly sins, but could also easily prompt a removal parade to step off.

New York does not allow the recall of state officials. If it did, Gov. Eliot Spitzer would have saved Empire State taxpayers time and money and a bunch a grief when he checked in his gubernatorial togs Wednesday morning, resigning his office a little more than 24 hours after his cash-and-carry liaisons became public.

After reading a number of accounts, Spitzer's decision was generally met with sighs of relief and substantial, satisfied clucking.

Still, a resignation or successful recall of an elected official cancels votes. That is not a defense of Spitzer's or anyone's behavior; it is a fact of our system.

Engel's bill would have made it more difficult to recall elected officials, but the details didn't fit.

He said he didn't want to waste fellow senators' time debating his bill. And they can use it.

The subject is worth a discussion, however, because the recall of a mayor or county sheriff or a county attorney essentially negates lawfully and properly cast votes. It undoes a legal election. Democratic apple carts everywhere lie with their wheels pointing to the sky.

We can vote them in, and we can vote them out before the natural course of democratic events, which we call an election.

Balance, equilibrium

This principle, as with most of them under the big tent of democracy, requires some balance, some equilibrium, a place in the middle from which the ends teeter.

Twenty-nine states, including Nebraska, have laws that allow local recalls, some of which, like ours, without specific grounds required. Eighteen states (neither Nebraska nor New York) can recall elected state officials. Only two governors have ever been recalled, the most recent Gray Davis in California in 2003.

Recall via petition is a mechanism to keep control where it should be: in the hands of the people.

The other side of that quarter reminds us that the constant threat or misuse of recall can diminish efforts to elect qualified individuals and let them serve until the next election.

LB878 was not an answer, more of a question that needed to be asked. If we're using recall as an auxiliary election, a B-side civic afterthought, then we do indeed need to have that debate.