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SCOTUS Says Time's Up
updated December 13, 200
The Supreme Court of the United States in the two hours before midnight on December 12th reversed and remanded the Florida Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision of last Friday. In so doing, it exonerated Circuit Judge Sanders Sauls and dissenting Chief Justice Charles Wells while publicly reigning in the activist quartet of Florida justices. The Federal Supreme Court held 7-2 (Stevens and Ginsburg dissenting) that the recount scheme advanced by the quartet of state judges was unconstitutional in both due process and equal protection aspects. Judges may not change the laws of the legislature because they desire to affect outcomes. All votes must be treated equally. Rules cannot be changed after the fact In an additional 5-4 decision the Court barred the current recount from taking place. This act validates the existing slate of Bush electors as certified by the Secretary of State.
Leading Democrats Then Called for Gore to Concede. Appeaing on news shows before midnight, leading Democrats Ed Rendell, Chairman of the Democratic Party; Senator Robert Torrecilli (D-NJ) and House member Robert Wexler ( D-FL) all called for Gore to concede and not ask the Florida Supreme Court to fashion a further remedy by creating a uniform standard acceptable to the Federal Supreme Court and conducting yet another recount before the 18th. This option was left open by the federal Supreme Court decision. The offical campaign response was to say that they were reviewing the decision this evening and would react tomorrow. The Gore campaign has suspended its recount organization and scheduled time for a television adress to the nation Tuesday evening.
How Tied Is The Election? If, as Lawrence O’Donnell suggests, we look at both the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts together, we have an 8-8 tie on recount procedures and a 10-6 decision on the constitutionality of recount systems and standards. Bush prevails in the Electoral College by a vote of 271-267. Gore leads the popular vote by 3/10ths of one percent, under the 5/10ths of one- percent margin of error that triggers an automatic recount in several states. The Senate is divided 50-50. The House has a 5-vote Republican majority out of 435 seats. In the states, Republicans control both chambers in 17 states, Democrats in 16. In the remaining 17 states the chambers are divided. In the matter of redistricting, there are 26 states where neither party controls both the legislature and the governorship, says David Broder, summing things up in The Washington Post. As we are also aware, 49 percent of the eligible citizens didn’t vote and 51 percent did.
Democrat efforts to discard overseas military ballots defeated. Also on Monday, a federal appeals court judge in Atlanta as well as the Florida Supreme Court denied three Democrat supporter law suits seeking to eliminate enough absentee ballots to give the state election to the Gore campaign. The Atlanta case involved 2,400 overseas ballots mailed before Election Day but arriving in the ten-day window after the election established by state policy. The other two cases were the Seminole and Martin county cases that involved 25,000 application envelopes but not ballots themselves. A related case, Bay County, is still up for appeal to t he state Supreme Court. In a related matter, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) has blocked passage of a bill authorizing polling places on domestic military installations. The move kills the House-passed measure in the Senate, preventing a vote before the end of the current lame duck session.
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George Mason, 1725-92, was known as the Sage of Gunston Hall.
His Virginia declaration of rights, written in 1776, was the model for the first section of the Declaration of
Independence. A friend of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, Mason was an original drafter of the Constitution
and the first ten amendments to the Bill of Rights. He refused, however, to sign the final version of the Constitution
because he thought it did too little for individuals and, without the Bill of Rights, gave too much power to the
government.This column honors his memory.
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