John Paul Stevens: Bush v. Gore Decision Rationale Was 'Unacceptable'

[Jim Lane]

67. Yet another straw man.

I don't know of anyone -- any real live person -- who believes that "it's all Nader's fault." (Some people who are justifiably pissed at Nader may have, in the heat of the moment, sometimes overstated his culpability. If that has actually happened, then I agree with you that it was error.)

Nader made his initial mark in tort law. An elementary principle of tort law is that an event can have more than one cause.

There's nothing inconsistent in maintaing (as I and many others do) the truth of all the following propositions:
* The purge of 50,000 or so Florida voters was illegal and was one proximate cause of the Bush presidency.
* The setup of the "butterfly ballots" was improper, whether through incompetence or malevolence, and was one proximate cause of the Bush presidency.
* Nader's decision to exercise his legal right to run in the general election (as opposed to, say, running in the Democratic primaries) was a bad choice because a foreseeable consequence -- one foreseen by many at the time -- was that the practical effect would be to help Bush. Although not everyone who voted for Nader would, in his absence from the ballot, have voted for Gore, enough of them would have done so (even according to polling cited by Nader himself) that, with no Nader on the ballot, Gore would have won Florida by a cheat-proof margin. Nader's bad choice was one proximate cause of the Bush presidency.
* The appeal in Bush v. Gore was wrongly decided by the Supreme Court, and that wrong decision was one proximate cause of the Bush presidency.

Other causes could be listed as well.

I agree with your reference to the voter purge (although I think that Katherine Harris deserves to be blamed for that along with Jeb Bush). Yet one could make the same comment about the purge that the Naderites always make in defense of Nader's candidacy: It wouldn't have resulted in a Bush presidency if not for the Supreme Court's action. Yet, somehow, no one here ever suggests that the wrongful SCOTUS decision somehow retroactively exonerated Harris and Bush for the voter purge. The concept that an event can have multiple causes is applied to Harris and Bush but is mysteriously suspended when it comes to Nader.