HORSE HOCKEY !!!
Umpires are paid to call balls and strikes. They sometimes have to take the heat when the 7th game of the World Series ends on a called 3rd strike in the bottom of the 9th, with 2 outs and the home team is behind.
O'Connor shouldn't have taken the job if she really feels this way about the decision. Is she forgetting that John Marshall FAMOUSLY wrote in Marbury v. Madison that:
It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.
AND, Is she forgetting that SCOTUS UNANIMOUSLY remanded back to the Florida Supreme Court a closely-related case, Bush v. Palm Beach Canvassing Board for re-consideration eight days before deciding Bush v. Gore?
FYI: The Florida Supreme Court's decision allowing recounts was not changed - thus, Bush v. Gore went to SCOTUS.
AND, is she forgetting that Bush v. Gore was decided 7-2 [Breyer and Souter concurring with the 5 conservatives] on the basis of 14th Amendment Equal Protection violation in counting votes differently in different districts?
AND, is she forgetting that the Florida Legislature FULLY intended to participate in the elctoral process, as provided in 3 U.S.C. §5?
FYI: 3 U.S. C. §5 provides that:
If any State shall have provided, by laws enacted prior to the day fixed for the appointment of the electors, for its final determination of any controversy or contest concerning the appointment of all or any of the electors of such State, by judicial or other methods or procedures, and such determination shall have been made at least six days before the time fixed for the meeting of the electors, such determination made pursuant to such law so existing on said day, and made at least six days prior to said time of meeting of the electors, shall be conclusive, and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes as provided in the Constitution, and as hereinafter regulated, so far as the ascertainment of the electors appointed by such State is concerned.
AND, is she forgetting that 3 U.S. C. §5's "Safe Harbor" provision set the final date for settling the selection of electors at 12 DEC 2000 - and that a recount WAS NOT a remedy since it COULD NOT be accomplished by the deadline?
AND, is she forgetting that the second part of the Bush v. Gore decision was 5-4 ONLY because the liberal justices STILL wanted the 14th Amendment violation remedy to be that Gore to was have another bite at the apple - with another recount?
O'Connor is a putz - just trying to burnish up her own reputation with remarks like she gave to the Trib ...
...Says the same scumbag who ruled that government can seize private property and hand it over to a private business. Wow.. Anyway, she can go soil herself wherever she wants these days. Nobody cares. Good riddance.
I thought the relevant decision was 7-2, not 5-4.
I thought each time the recount was done Gore lost more votes.......
In the 1991 World Series, the Minnesota Twins won 4 games to 3. Would Sandy O’Conner have stepped in to change the rules and say the Atlanta Braves “really won” because they scored 29 runs, while the Twins only scored 24 runs? Or would she have ruled that the Series should be settled under the rules of the game as agreed before they played? My guess: Sandy’s turned even more liberal - she would overturn the World Series too if enough people whined at her. Liberals disgust me. Without the rule of law, even America would turn into an ugly place, and they are trying that as an experiment.
Wow. What an unmitigated a-hole.
For some reason, the two people she reminds me of here are Robert McNamara and Jane Fonda.
This is NOT what Supreme Court decisions should be based on.
Yes, the country would have been a lot better of with Al Jazzera Gore in as POTUS in 2000 to blaze the path for the next great Communist in Chief: Bronco Bama (sarc).
pathetic
Ha! If Sandy really thinks that I take it as a sign that senility has set in. As John Riggins once told her - lighten up, Sandy baby!
HORSE HOCKEY !!!
Actually, she's absolutely right about this. Don't think of the U.S. Supreme Court as an umpire, but as the commissioner's office of Major League Baseball. Just because a manager files a protest against an umpire's call, it doesn't mean the commissioner's office has to hear the case. They can legitimately determine that the manager has no standing to bring the case.
That's exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court should have done in Bush v. Gore. The U.S. Constitution has very clear provisions that covered the situation in 2000, and by agreeing to take on the case, the Supreme Court basically tossed those provisions out the window. If Florida could not determine its own Electoral Votes by the time the Electoral College met, then the national Electoral Vote would be held without Florida's being counted. Neither candidate would have had enough Electoral Votes to win the election outright, so the president would have been elected in a special vote by Congress. Bush would have won that election, too -- so the irony is that the Court's involvement was meaningless in the end.
Don’t worry SDO, any reputation as a defender of the US Constitution and American principles were lost with the Traitorous SCOTUS 5-4 ruling on ObamaCare by POS Justce Roberts.
In baseball games, not in hockey games, with or without horses..
Federal courts should have no role whatsoever in our elections. The justices of the Supreme Court have expanded their jurisdiction to an extent never intended by the authors of Article III. They are NOT umpires for the political system.
The written Constitution anticipated EXACTLY the situation that arose on Florida, and Article II, as amended by XI and XII, provided the EXACTLY correct solution - a solution which, if implemented, would have left George W. Bush sworn in on January 20, 2001 with much better title to his office than he had.
The Secretary of State of Florida had already certified a slate of Electors for President and Vice President. AT MOST, the Florida Supreme Court could have ordered the appointment of a rival slate of Gore electors. The Republican Florida Legislature was prepared to exercise its exclusive power to appoint electors if needed.
The Electoral Vote Counting Act passed after 1876 lays out what Congress is supposed to do in this situation, which is to accept the correct slate after deliberation.
If the legal slate was accepted by the Republican majority, Bush would have been elected. If both slates had been disqualified, making no candidate with a majority, the House, voting by states (the Republicans then controlling 30 states), Bush would have been elected.
Only if the Republican majority had certified the illegally appointed Gore electors, instead of the electors chosen according to the method prescribed in Article II ("as the [Florida] Legislature thereof shall direct") could Gore have been President.
So, we could have allowed the Founders' system to work as designed, or we could have asked the Supreme Court to assume even more illegitimate and unconstitutional power, and we chose - poorly.
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.
The SCOTUS (and her) actually followed that Constitution thingy.
Now, she ‘feels’ that’s a “bad thing”.
She sholda voted how she feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeels.
Yeech.
LLS
For the umpteen thousandth time, the Supreme Court did not install Bush as President. What it did was tell Florida, which had already passed the counting deadline provided for in its state law, to stop counting and certify its electors. That certification was for Bush by 537 votes. (The part of me that likes irony has always wished that the margin had been exactly one vote more.)
Maybe Jim Joyce shouldn’t have made a call on that runner at first in the game with Andres Galarraga, right, Sandy Baby?
If the supremes had not decided that case, we would have had a constitutional crisis, and perhaps civil war.
Sandy Day O’Conner was Inflicted on the United States by an agreement between Ronald Reagan’s Female Dog of a daughter(ERA backer Maureen) and Ronald Reagan. Seem RR had an agreement with Female Dog Maureen that Maureen would not cause any “trouble” with RR in exchange for rr’s first USSC pick being a “women”. Making and keeping that “agreement” was RR’s Second LARGEST MISTAKE. Picking GHWB as his Veep want the first.
God forbid the SCOTUS stands up for the Constitution and rule of law.
I like your post. You covered—and well, I would add—all the salient points of the matter.
Time was running out--there wasn't time for the endless recounts Gore wanted to let his people "find" more votes if Florida's electors were going to be certified in time to cast their ballots. Plus the recounts that were done later showed that Bush did win Florida.