I've often suspected that Antonin Scalia lived in an alternate reality, but this comment he made last night in New York proves it:"U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the high court did not inject itself into the 2000 presidential election.Let's take a trip down memory lane.
Speaking at the Time Warner Center last night, Scalia said: 'The election was dragged into the courts by the Gore people. We did not go looking for trouble.'"
First of all, the Gore people took the election problems into the courts because the state official in charge of the election -- the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign named Katherine Harris -- refused their state-sanctioned request for a manual recount. To characterize this as some kind of reckless, wild-eyed lawsuit is insane. (Especially since, as TPM reminds us, the most thorough recount analysis showed that Gore would, in fact, have won the state if he'd pressed for a complete statewide recount.)
Second, the case only leapt from the state courts to the U.S. Supreme Court because the Bush campaign appealed the decision of the Florida Supreme Court. For all of Bush's constant complaining about runaway lawsuits and federal appeals, he surely leapt at the chance to get his own complaints before the High Court. How Scalia can lay this at the feet of the Gore camp is beyond me. (It's called "Bush v. Gore" for a reason, Tony. Bush was the plaintiff, and therefore his name gets to come first.)
Third, the Supreme Court didn't have to take the case. Despite all the pundits' claims that there was a "constitutional crisis" going on with the recount, there wasn't anything of the sort. The Constitution has a specific means of resolution for a contested election, and the path to resolving it goes through Congress, and not the Supreme Court. You think someone who claims to defend the original meaning of the Constitution would understand that. Moreover, Scalia had long been at the forefront of arguing against federal interference in state affairs, especially in the realm of voting. Yet another "principle" that he quickly abandoned in the rush to hand the election to Bush.
I know the 2000 election is old news, and the insanity of Antonin Scalia is even older. But I still can't help getting mad.
6 comments:
Ha! Well said.
Good one swa.
Yeah, I came across that story today, too. What complete bullshit. I just shake my head and wish we actually had a media and an opposition party when I read crap like that...
Awesome post.
Absolutely terrific post. Very well-said.
His statement is so....appropos to how the Bush camp says stuff: either they get caught in a bold faced lie, or they say something juuuuust outside the truth enough that they can cover their tracks with one of those "not what I meant" things. I mean...it's not even good spin.
I've been meaning to ask your (all of y'alls) opinion about something:
A few of us were nursing some Bell's Batch 7000 and discussing the upcoming 2006 elections. The impasse we reached is that some believed that the total sum of the past few months' worth of scandals in Washington would actually discourage people from voting. In other words, will people be so sick of the bullshit that they just throw up their hands and not vote at all, thinking that regardless of the options...we're screwed?
Smitty:
I think some people will be discouraged from voting in 2006, but they'll largely be Republican voters -- either libertarians in a furor over the GOP's spendthrift big government ways, the Religious Right folks who feel sold out for one reason or another, or general conservatives who are ashamed of what's going on in their name.
Independents love to rally around a "throw the bums out" theme, however, and this election should bring them out in droves. Bush is polling horribly among independents, too, so any of them that come out to the polls will move against the GOP.
And, needless to say, Democrats are going to be out in droves.
Tokyo Joe:
Good point about the "Sore Loserman" imagery that surrounded the Gore request for the recount. And, yes, the Republicans and the media trotted out the story about how Nixon nobly refused to contest the 1960 election, but there's one problem with that -- it simply wasn't true.
As described in brief
here, Nixon and the RNC initiated recounts in eleven different states, sent campaign agents into eight states to conduct "field tests," and continued to maneuver to challenge the election right up to the point that Kennedy's victory was confirmed by the electoral college.
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