As we approach the 10th anniversary of the Bush v. Gore decision -- technically, December 12 -- it is interesting to note how much of our current political predicament can be discerned in the events of those days. The Bush-Gore election illustrates three key points about today's political and media environment:
- Conservatives fight harder and dirtier for what they want than progressives.
- The mainstream media gives conservatives a pass for acting and speaking in their own political interest while criticizing progressives for the same thing.
- Conservative commentators recognize few if any boundaries in their willingness to demonize progressives, with virtually no corollary of any kind among progressives.
How badly did conservatives want to win? Remember Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris? Before the election, she hired a GOP-connected database company to purge the state's voter rolls of thousands of mostly minority citizens, many of whom it falsely categorized as felons. Republican election officials allowed Republican operatives to doctor absentee-ballot applications in Seminole and Martin counties, while Democrats were not granted the same right.
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"As we approach the 10th anniversary of the Bush v. Gore decision -- technically, December 12 -- it is interesting to note how much of our current political predicament can be discerned in the events of those days."
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/ta052109.html
Five Supreme Court justices took leave of their senses on December 12, 2000, a date that lives in jurisprudential infamy. It still boggles the mind 10 years later. Justice Kennedy told a Congressional committee in 2001 that the Court had decided to spend its "capital of trust", an indirect admission that he and fellow Republican justices acted extralegally.
The Court's 5-4 ruling falsely attributed to Florida an intent to treat December 12th as a "drop dead" date for completing a contest recount. That locked in the result while 175,000 ballots containing decipherable votes remained uncounted. The Five said, in effect, that Florida preferred to insulate an inaccurate result from Congressional challenge (by completing the process by December 12th) rather than take extra time (until December 18th, 2000 or January 6th, 2001) to achieve an accurate result.
This makes no sense whatsoever, has no support in Florida law (as Florida Supreme Court justice Leander Shaw pointed out in an overlooked heroic opinion shortly after the Five's Bush v. Gore fait accompli), and could only have been arrived-at by justices intentionally wishing to fix the result for their fellow Republican, GW Bush. Otherwise the Five would have remanded the case to the Florida Supreme Court for a continuation of the recount in line with the equal protection principles set forth in the Bush v. Gore opinion.
I still have a dream.
Eric C. Jacobson
Public Interest Lawyer
Culver City, California
Founder, Supreme Court Five Censure Project