Posted on 09/28/2003 9:04:16 AM PDT by sfwarrior
It's amazing that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in a fit of pique, actually did the right thing in letting the recall election proceed. And that it did so unanimously is all the more shocking. Historically, those wunderkinds in black robes have been revolting against the will of the people of California for years. And that, to many, is just plain revolting. Why vote?
The bedrock principles of this nation are perhaps best characterized by our ability to hold elections in a timely manner. The issue was not a mere "postponement" of the election, it was a cancellation of the election, a downright annulment. Elections are snapshots in time. Wait a year, or five months, as the original panel of the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals ordered, and you basically have a very different election. The outcome of an election can easily change day by day, as polls repeatedly show us. Postponing one for five months is an outright nullification of an election.
Elections are the very foundations of a democracy, and the courts have historically given great deference to them. The government gets its legitimacy by the people in its elections. A court interfering with an election is outrageous, as it clearly undermines the voters' ability to express their will. The panel's three judges had earlier maliciously thumbed their noses at the state constitution and the people to protect Gray Davis. That ruling ridiculed the 700,000 absentee voters that had already voted and another 2.1 million California citizens who had signed petitions in accordance with the state's recall rules as prescribed by the constitution. Why the postponement? Because there might be some hanging chads.
The court argued that there was a similarity between their ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court case in the Gore vs. Bush ruling. Nice try, but no banana. The Appeals Court connection it had laboriously tried to make was absurd. The Supremes said in the Gore vs. Bush ruling that various Florida counties had each held different standards for how to reinspect chads, and hence a third recount should not proceed. This Supreme Court ruling, incidentally, was in line with the Florida state constitution, which specified clear timelines for when an election must be certified. The third recount, which was the subject of the Gore vs. Bush case, was to be made after the statutory state deadlines had passed.
What the black-robed Democratic justices of the Florida Supreme Court did was ignore their own state law by allowing only recounts in certain counties and, even then, allowing each county to use different standards in analyzing the chads. That was the violation the U.S. Supremes set right by upholding the Florida secretary of state's ruling of certification.
Justice Alex Kozinski, sitting on the en banc panel, said California, unlike Florida, has uniform standards for recounting problems like hanging chads. The three-judge appeals panel in San Francisco, which ruled against the recall election, made a mockery of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling by intentionally distorting its holding.
Grasping At Straws
The Ninth Circuit panel didn't stop at just ridiculing the Supreme Court; it went further by putting in a cynical dig at Bush's war in Iraq. Following the Ninth Circuit's mangling of Gore vs. Bush, and without missing a beat, it turned its legal analysis to the Middle East in order to garner support for its opinion. You know that when the court has to reach halfway around the world to bolster its argument, it's really grasping at straws.
It actually had the temerity to say in its opinion, which would have canceled an entire election, that it was preserving democracy. Talk about an Alice in Wonderland kind of logic:
"We would be remiss if we did not observe that this is a critical time in our nation's history when we are attempting to persuade the people of other nations of the value of free and open elections. Thus, we are especially mindful of the need to demonstrate our commitment to elections held fairly, free of chaos, with each citizen assured that his or her vote will be counted, and with each vote entitled to equal weight."
Yeah, right, and the best way to do that is to cancel an election and nullify the desire of 2.1 million Californians who signed the recall petition and another 700,000 voters that had already voted by absentee ballot. Yeah, that's the ticket. That should teach those darn Iraqis about the meaning of real democracy. You might expect elections to be summarily canceled by some brutal dictator in some South American, tin-pot republic or by some Middle Eastern military dictatorship, but not in California.
Nullifications Happen
Election nullifications occur all the time, and, regrettably, the people have generally put up much less of a fight than they did last week in battling to preserve the October recall. The voters of California passed Proposition 187, which would have stopped the state from bestowing any benefits to illegal aliens. Yet a federal judge found that this action would have usurped the federal government's authority for regulating immigration. Now, that's quite a stretch of the imagination. A state can no longer determine how it spends its own dollars? Who can? Apparently, only progressive activists in black robes with an ax to grind. Why weren't the liberals caterwauling about an election that was stolen by the Ninth Circuit? Because the electoral theft went in their direction.
You have to give these liberal judges (nearly all of whom are Democrats) points for creativity and brazenness. A single, unelected judge has the ability to overturn an election that doesn't even mention immigration law. The black-robed liberals on the bench have a bottomless bag of magic tricks that lets them conjure foregone conclusions and -- voilà! -- they grab the convoluted reasoning out of the bag to fit their decision. Canceling an election? No problem -- the October recall would hurt minorities.
In the Proposition 187 case, Davis wouldn't even appeal the decision of the federal judge. That's the kind of dogged, tough persistence...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Of 72 cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2002-03 term, 28 of them were criminal cases or directly related to issues of criminal law. Ten of these 28 were from the Ninth Circuit and all 10 were reversed.
That means the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit 100 percent of the time when considering criminal cases. The Supreme Court had to expend more than one third of its attention in criminal law just curing judicial defects from the Ninth.
Two of these cases were reversed summarily, meaning the decisions were so obviously wrong that the high court did not even need to hear oral argument.
By comparison, the Supreme Court took 10 criminal cases from the remaining 10 U.S. circuit courts of appeal and reversed nine of them. From state courts, the Supreme Court took eight criminal cases, reversing five.
While these reversal rates are nearly as high, bear in mind that the cases came from the rest of the nation. The Ninth Circuit contributes as much trouble as all the other circuits—and more than all the states combined.
Don't appoint any new judges to the smaller, California only, 9th Circuit until all its judges have reached senior status or left. Then appoint new appellate judges to the 9th from anywhere but the federal district court judges in California, to break up the 9th's disfunctional institutional culture.
What the black-robed Democratic justices of the Florida Supreme Court did was ignore their own state law by allowing only recounts in certain counties and, even then, allowing each county to use different standards in analyzing the chads. That was the violation the U.S. Supremes set right by upholding the Florida secretary of state's ruling of certification.Bump!
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com
The embarrassed yet still unchastened attorney, likely flushed with anger and dismay over his double-think filter having failed him at the brink, did not recognize the soundness of the advice. Thus, with his adversarial mode still engaged but off just a beat, popped off -- apparently missing the irony -- "Well who's the biggest clown here?"
It is too bad reporter Adam Sparks didn't report this real punchline of this tragi-comic act, and left it to me to recount it here to a much smaller audience.
If any reader here knows Mr. Sparks, please tell him how he's gone far too soft.
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