The death of a Chief Justice is marked by the Loyal Opposition
After thirty-three years on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist is dead of thyroid cancer. He was 80.
He will probably best be remembered as having presided over the Supreme Court decision which prevented the Democrats from stealing Florida and the Presidency for Al Gore in 2000, perhaps not so much through the blatantly crooked manual recount they tried to justify by fraudulently suppressing George W. Bush's initial statewide margin as by simply stalling until the verdict of Florida's voters either way became academic.
Contrary to what is generally implied, the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore did not arbitrarily call a halt to the recount. It simply insisted that the recount had to be completed before the date mandated by the Constitution for the meeting of the Electoral College to actually elect the new President.
As it happened, due to the dilatory tactics of the Democrats themselves, that date was the very next day!
Was all the rhetoric about making sure that "all the votes were counted" a sham? Certainly the arbitrary exclusion of hundreds of perfectly legal military absentee ballots by election officials in Democratic counties (Florida law specifically allows such ballots to be counted without postmarks, but military ballots trend heavily Republican) casts considerable doubt upon the sincerity of that slogan. Coupled with the exclusion hundreds of illegally counted votes from felons (a population which trends heavily Democratic), an honest initial count by the very Democratic officials who claimed that they wanted "all the votes to count" would have increased Bush's margin to a point where it would have been far more difficult to credibly challenge.
So what would have happened had Bush v. Gore been decided the other way? If the Constitution had been followed, the ultimate result of any recount would have been moot. The Electoral College would have met the next day without Florida's electors- and elected Al Gore President.
An entire state would have been disenfranchised by those whose battle cry was "Let all the votes be counted," and a presidential election stolen despite the lack of any reasonable ground for not certifying the Bush electors in the first place.
The "butterfly ballot" had been in use for decades without complaint, both in Florida and elsewhere. The only documented case of voter intimidation was the closing of a polling place in a predominanty Republican Haitian-American precinct as the result of violence by Democratic thugs. The result should have been certified as soon as the initial recount required by Florida law was completed, and Bush was still ahead. In fact, if the military ballots had all been counted, and the felon ballots excluded, it is doubtful whether the initial statewide margin would have been close enough to have even required that one recount!
The likely consequences had Bush v. Gore gone the other way is anything but a minor detail. Somehow, though, neither the media nor the historical accounts I've seen bother to mention it, and the rationale of Bush v. Gore- admittedly hard to follow because of the number of concurring opinions involved- somehow never gets mentioned.
I made the mistake, by the way, of following a link at another blog to the commentary on Mr. Rehnquist's death at a cesspool of vitriol, hate and generally classless partisan raving called The Democratic Underground (to which I refuse to link, lest I need to wash my blog out with soap afterward). This is the site which published a chorus of rejoicing and celebration at the death of Ronald Reagan.
This time, the lead post simply spoke of urinating on the Chief Justice's grave. Most of the respondents seemed to think that this was clever, or something.
Uncharacteristically for this site, a couple of posters actually suggested that this was an inappropriate and rather classless response to the death of a human being (funny, but that didn't seem to occur to them when Mr. Reagan died). The response was that the Democrats have been too nice since 2000, and that it's about time that they were a little rude.
How out of touch with reality would one have to be to even read that statement with a straight face, much less write it?
He will probably best be remembered as having presided over the Supreme Court decision which prevented the Democrats from stealing Florida and the Presidency for Al Gore in 2000, perhaps not so much through the blatantly crooked manual recount they tried to justify by fraudulently suppressing George W. Bush's initial statewide margin as by simply stalling until the verdict of Florida's voters either way became academic.
Contrary to what is generally implied, the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore did not arbitrarily call a halt to the recount. It simply insisted that the recount had to be completed before the date mandated by the Constitution for the meeting of the Electoral College to actually elect the new President.
As it happened, due to the dilatory tactics of the Democrats themselves, that date was the very next day!
Was all the rhetoric about making sure that "all the votes were counted" a sham? Certainly the arbitrary exclusion of hundreds of perfectly legal military absentee ballots by election officials in Democratic counties (Florida law specifically allows such ballots to be counted without postmarks, but military ballots trend heavily Republican) casts considerable doubt upon the sincerity of that slogan. Coupled with the exclusion hundreds of illegally counted votes from felons (a population which trends heavily Democratic), an honest initial count by the very Democratic officials who claimed that they wanted "all the votes to count" would have increased Bush's margin to a point where it would have been far more difficult to credibly challenge.
So what would have happened had Bush v. Gore been decided the other way? If the Constitution had been followed, the ultimate result of any recount would have been moot. The Electoral College would have met the next day without Florida's electors- and elected Al Gore President.
An entire state would have been disenfranchised by those whose battle cry was "Let all the votes be counted," and a presidential election stolen despite the lack of any reasonable ground for not certifying the Bush electors in the first place.
The "butterfly ballot" had been in use for decades without complaint, both in Florida and elsewhere. The only documented case of voter intimidation was the closing of a polling place in a predominanty Republican Haitian-American precinct as the result of violence by Democratic thugs. The result should have been certified as soon as the initial recount required by Florida law was completed, and Bush was still ahead. In fact, if the military ballots had all been counted, and the felon ballots excluded, it is doubtful whether the initial statewide margin would have been close enough to have even required that one recount!
The likely consequences had Bush v. Gore gone the other way is anything but a minor detail. Somehow, though, neither the media nor the historical accounts I've seen bother to mention it, and the rationale of Bush v. Gore- admittedly hard to follow because of the number of concurring opinions involved- somehow never gets mentioned.
I made the mistake, by the way, of following a link at another blog to the commentary on Mr. Rehnquist's death at a cesspool of vitriol, hate and generally classless partisan raving called The Democratic Underground (to which I refuse to link, lest I need to wash my blog out with soap afterward). This is the site which published a chorus of rejoicing and celebration at the death of Ronald Reagan.
This time, the lead post simply spoke of urinating on the Chief Justice's grave. Most of the respondents seemed to think that this was clever, or something.
Uncharacteristically for this site, a couple of posters actually suggested that this was an inappropriate and rather classless response to the death of a human being (funny, but that didn't seem to occur to them when Mr. Reagan died). The response was that the Democrats have been too nice since 2000, and that it's about time that they were a little rude.
How out of touch with reality would one have to be to even read that statement with a straight face, much less write it?
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