It should be pointed out, however, that there is a conservative and a radical system of initiative and referendum: one which fixes the percentage necessary to initiate and adopt a measure at a point so high as to prevent its actual operation, and another which places it so low as to make its frequent use feasible. The older and more radical group of propagandists, finding their general scheme so widely taken up in practical politics, soon began to devote their attention rather to attacking the stricter safeguards thrown up by those who gave their support to direct government in theory only.
In its simple form of initiation by five per cent of the voters and adoption by a majority of those voting on the measure submitted, this new device was undoubtedly a revolutionary change from the American system of government as conceived by the framers of the Constitution of the United States--with its checks and balances, indirect elections, and judicial control over legislation. The more radical of the advocates of direct government frankly admitted that this was true, and they sought to strengthen this very feature of their system by the addition of another device, known as the recall, which, when applied to judges as well as other elective officers, reduced judicial control over legislation to a practical nullity. Where judges are elected for short terms by popular vote and made subject to the recall, and where laws are made by popular vote of the same electors who choose the judges, it is obvious that the very foundations of judicial supremacy are undermined.
The recall, like direct democracy, was not new to American politics. Both were understood, at least in principle, by the framers of the Federal Constitution and rejected decisively. The recall seems to have made its appearance first in local form,--in the charter of Los Angeles, adopted in 1903. From there it went to the Seattle charter of 1906, and two years later it was adopted as a state-wide system applicable to all elective officers by Oregon. Its progress was swiftest in municipal affairs, for it quite generally accompanied "the commission form" of city government as a check on the commissioners in their exercise of enlarged powers.