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I've been digging up all my articles from 2000. The Bush forces realize they have no chance of winning this election. What the fuck are they up to this time? I keep remembering someone posting a while back that CDC has 500,000 coffins. I swear something's up.
This Eric Alterman classic was posted on GEMSNBC on December 13th 2000.
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Dec. 13 — Let’s not mince words: George W. Bush, aided by a narrow conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court willing to invent new legal theory out of whole cloth specifically for these purposes, has stolen the 2000 election. Al Gore indisputably won the popular vote. He almost certainly would have won the tally in the Electoral College had Florida’s vote ever been subjected to a full and fair manual count as mandated by Florida law.
HOW DO WE KNOW? Just look at the lengths to which Bush, and his allies in the Florida Governor’s office, the Florida Secretary of State’s office, the Florida legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and now, the U.S. Supreme Court were willing to go to prevent it. The Bush forces realized they had no chances of winning a fair count, so they were forced to employ a scorched-earth policy to prevent one. Congratulations, it worked.
TARNISHED PRIZE
George Bush will become president on Jan. 20 as the most tarnished individual to take the oath of office in more than a century. He owes his victory not to the majority of the voters, but to an informal network of conservative political and legal hacks who managed to successfully run out the clock on a fair count of the votes. The degree to which the U.S. Supreme Court was willing to make itself a party to these tawdry proceedings would be shocking, were it not for all the shameless precursors that foreshadowed it. That once-hallowed institution emerges from this election a far bigger loser than any candidate who may have unsuccessfully ran for office.
STRANGE LEGAL LOGIC
But here is the real beauty part. As it “remanded” the Florida Court’s decision, it did so in a fashion that was calculated to make any remedy impossible. How did it do that? By relying on exactly the same decision it had rejected, insisting that the Dec. 12 electoral deadline is somehow sacrosanct because the Florida Supreme Court had itself accepted it. And it did so by releasing its decision a bare two hours before the deadline passed, making any challenge impossible. Pure coincidence, no doubt.
In fact, the Court’s sacred Dec. 12 deadline is a fiction. As David Greenberg has repeatedly pointed out, in 1960, Hawaii arranged for its Electoral College votes to be switched when it was determined that Kennedy, not Nixon, had won a carefully audited count after the vote had already been certified. The only true deadline for getting a full count finished is the day of the actual vote, Jan. 6, when the Electoral College actually meets to choose the president.
LAYERS OF CORRUPTION
Discovering the many layers of personal and political corruption that undergird this decision will challenge scholars for decades. Was it relevant to the court’s decision that Clarence Thomas’ wife was already working for an outfit that is helping to handle the Bush transition? What of the fact that two of Justice Scalia’s children work for law firms hired to represent George W. Bush? It is wrong to impute motives on the basis of circumstance, and so I will refrain.
But clearly these facts are relevant: Beneath their flowing robes, the majority justices are all political professionals chosen by conservative Republican presidents because they believed, rightly or wrongly, that they could be trusted to do the “right” thing in any situation that might arise.
If that means unprecedented judicial activism in the name of judicial restraint, so be it. If that means a federal overturning of a state law in the name of states’ rights, so be it. If that means inventing new legal theory in the name of past precedent, so be it. If that means relying on a case from a court whose decision it has already rejected, so be it.
In a way, the Supreme Court decision perfectly embodies the Bush campaign, from the candidate’s romancing of racist and anti-Catholic vote at Bob Jones University to his nearly successful attempt to hide crucial aspects of his background and history until the contest’s very last moments. Bush calls his political philosophy “Compassionate Conservatism.” A more accurate slogan would be “Whatever It Takes.” We better get used to it.
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Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor to MSNBC on the Internet.
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