The 'Accidental President'

Newsweek ^ | 09/17/2001 | David A. Kaplan

[Truthsayer20]

Sept. 17 issue

[Delphster]

How come no stories on those great judical minds of the Florida Supreme who caused the crisis to go the United States Supreme court.?

[Henry F. Bowman]

How could the conservative Court majority decide to step into a presidential election, all the more so using the doctrinal excuse of “equal protection”? Equal protection? That’s the constitutional rationale the liberals had used for a generation to expand rights, and the conservatives despised it. But now the conservatives were embracing the doctrine, claiming that different recount standards in Florida counties amounted to unequal protection? The whole thing smelled bad.

Axes have been misused by axe-murderers, but that doesn't mean that they aren't occasionally necessary and useful tools for the law abiding to chop down trees.

[deport]

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The Accidental President: How 143 Lawyers, 9 Supreme Court Justices, and 5,963,110 Floridians Landed George W. Bush in the White House

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[MJY1288]

I agree, the real story is how the Florida Supreme Court ignored the U.S. Supreme Court, and ignored existing Florida Election Laws

[marajade]

"How come no stories on those great judical minds of the Florida Supreme who caused the crisis to go the United States Supreme court.?"

Because everyone knows that their decisions were a mess. It was by design that the US Supreme Court would be the final arbitrators of all state courts. If the liberals don't like it, they can submit an amendment to the Constitution to change it.

To try and argue that only liberals can use the equal protection clause is absurd.

[Morgan's Raider]

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, had long ago become part of the Dark Side

It is backhanded remarks like this that are the reason Conservatives have such contempt for the mainstream media. The demonizing is getting tiresome and frustrating, and from many of the rumblings I hear the left is just about to create the very monster they revel in accusing us of being. You can only whip and push even the tamest of dogs so far into a corner before he tears into you.

[marajade]

Their decision stands for itself based upon law; why should they have to defend it?

[Paradox]

I'm sick of this whining, I say, had the recount continued, chances are Bush would have won ANYWAYS.. sheesh.. I think 9 of the 10 recount strategies had Bush winning..

[laconic]

Many thanks to Jerry Ford (a man who NEVER should have been president) for his appointment of John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court over the strong objections of conservatives. They told this man of most middling talents NOT to appoint this liberal to the Court and look what we got; a snide, loud, talentless opponent of everything we stand for. But, then again, Ford always manages to serve as a useful tool for Democrats when they are in trouble: giving pardons to draft dodgers; advocating "censure" not impeachment for Clinton; co-chairing that ridiculous commission that recommended basically doing away with voter registration and voter checks with another flop, Jimmy Carter; and numerous other and in return he gets good press as a lovable fool, a loyal member of the "congressional club" and a prizewinner from the JFKennedy School, named after a man who actively stole a presidential election,

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Nobody's reading the damn things much anymore. Seen their circulation ? Layoff notices ?
The Arabs have a saying, "dogs bark, but the caravan travels on."

[Brices Crossroads]

The USSC did not stop the vote count. The USSC did not stop a vote recount. There was a count, then a machine recount (the only objective kind of recount for punch card ballots). The USSC, based upon Article II and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment overruled a Florida Supreme Court-sponsored VOTE-MANUFACTURING scheme. Article II gives the state legislature plenary authority to dictate the manner in which electors are to be chosen. When the Florida Supreme Court extended the Legislatively-mandated deadline for the Secretary of State to certify the election results, it violated Article II. When it sanctioned standardless recounts in 3 democratic counties, it violated the Equal Protection Clause. The USSC had the right, indeed the duty, to protect the Constitutional process by which Presidents are elected.

[ExiledInTaiwan]

You can only whip and push even the tamest of dogs so far into a corner before he tears into you.

Methinks the time for tearing into our mainstream media is long overdue.

[Rocko]

Scroll down and Freep.

[marajade]

Its hard to sell magazines when you are only selling to 50% of the country.

[KellyAdmirer]

Oh, what a happy day it will be for me when Newsweek goes out of business. Just what I would expect from them: a hit piece on poor old Justice Kennedy, who may "thump his chest" in private, but knows enough to keep quiet in public, quietly doing his job. Character assassination from the Left against someone incapable of fighting back, what a surprise.

The person who leaps out to me in this piece, though, is Justice Breyer. He sounds just like the liberal yahoos posting on Yahoo message boards, with his loud proclamations about how right he is and how wrong is everyone who disagrees with him. Ginsberg sounds just as bad, just undermining things quietly rather than loudly.

As for Gore, his strategies and his moronic literary efforts, all I can say is: what a loser.

[Hidy]

Nice job of stringing all the spin together to make it sound as if what happened should have happened. But it should NOT have. It was perhaps the most ill-reasoned, overreaching and overtly partisan decision in all the long history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For proof of that, one need only raise one's head above the spin-fog and observe what has actually happened here. Americans -- not just Floridians, but all Americans -- were denied the right to know, as precisely as possible, the true outcome of a tremendously important and tremendously disputed presidential election. To this VERY day, we don't know exactly what the outcome would have been, but we DO know that had every American voter's legal vote been counted, and counted for the candidate they desired, Gore would be president. No doubt about that. So why isn't he?

The Constitution provides for what should happen in cases like this, and it does NOT mention any role for the Supreme Court. It is not the Court's business who the people want to elect. The USSC had no business butting into this case. They did so for the most base and partisan reasons.

It was also spin that the Democrats were manufacturing votes. Worse, it was a deliberate lie. No incident of actual or attempted vote manufacturing was EVER cited. It was all hype. Propaganda. Likewise, it is spin that hand recounts are NOT the most reliable. The guy who invented the vote-o-matic said that the best way to get a truly accurate count was to count by hand.

All of your other arguments are spin, too -- recitations of things Baker came up with to keep the actual results from ever becoming known. None of them stress accuracy or the will of the electorate; they're all based on falsehoods or thinly stretched legalisms.

That's why none of the five dark-side judges will even say which one of them wrote the final decision. Otherwise, in history, (and they KNOW it) the Anthony Kennedy Decision or the Antonin Scalia Decision would be right up there with the Dred Scott one.

[KellyAdmirer]

the Anthony Kennedy Decision or the Antonin Scalia Decision

Sorry, dude, it isn't the Kennedy or Scalia decision. It is the UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT decision. And I can't tell you how much pleasure it gives me every single day as I hear, read and write about our duly elected national leader,

President George W. Bush.

Ah, I love the sound of it.

[DeaconRed]

"The USSC did not stop the vote count. The USSC did not stop a vote recount."

Thank You.
This has been spun buy the rats, for so long the idiot sheeple took it hook line and sinker, now some idiots are even saying Bush stole the election. Excuse me: Bush kept ALGORE from stealing the election.

[AngrySpud]

OK, Hidy, let's ALL stop the self-serving spin and get down to the real nuts-and-bolts of why Bush won and Gore lost ...

Gore didn't carry his home state of Tennessee, and there's NO WAY to spin that away!