Judicial activism?

Here's one example of judicial activism.

More here... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20899

That's an excellent article, Mr. Mountie, thank you.

My pleasure. Of the opinion journals left standing, nothing else comes close to this publication, I think. Take a look too at the Massing piece in that issue and the David Cole piece in the earlier issue... http://www.nybooks.com/index

And by the by, Time Warner has successfully lobbied the US Postal Service to increase rates for delivery of such (relatively) small journals and to decrease rates for Time Warner type magazines. "The Nation" estimates this will increase its cost by a half million a year.

The Girl has arts and letters daily as her home page, which is a web site maintained by the Chronicle of Higher Education. I find a great many interesting articles listed on that page: the Arts and Letters Daily page.

Yeppers. It isn't my home page but it has sat atop my 'favorites' since before I found abuzz and it is from there where I begin my reading each day.

No it was not. Al Gore was asking the state of Florida to selectively apply its election laws thereby denying George W. Bush and his supporters in Florida equal protection of Florida's law, which is unconstitutional according to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Rather than go over my objections to Bush v. Gore yet again, I'll just c&p this excerpt from the article linked earlier in this thread by blatham:

In recent decades the Supreme Court thrust itself into a highly political role in one case, Bush v. Gore, in which a 5-4 majority awarded the presidential election to George W. Bush. Toobin devotes thirty-seven pages to the episode, and he does a masterful job. He adds a few unknown touches on what went on inside the Court, but the power of his account lies in its laying out of the facts and his analysis. With Bush leading by a few hundred votes in Florida and a recount sought by Gore underway in key counties, the five justices?-Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy, and Thomas?-issued a stay that stopped the counting. Scalia, in an opinion of his own, explained that the recount threatened "irreparable harm"?-the necessary legal ground for issuing a stay?-to Bush and the country "by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." In all other circumstances, Toobin rightly comments, something as vague as "casting a cloud" would not be regarded as a genuine legal harm. Scalia, Toobin writes, [list]was looking at the election entirely through Bush's eyes; by his own words, the justice was clearly more concerned about producing a clean victory for the Republican than about determining the will of Florida's voters.

That was true of the final decision, too. The Court found a denial of the constitutional principle of equal protection of the laws in the fact that counties were recounting votes in different ways. It was a decision that defied reason, since plainly the most equitable way to determine the Florida vote accurately was to recount it everywhere, not to stop where it was being recounted. It was also a decision without legal precedent. Justice Kennedy in his opinion said the legal reasoning was "limited to the present circumstances." In other words, as another justice said years ago, the decision was like a restricted railroad ticket, "good for this day and this train only."

In my judgment the Court did not even have legal jurisdiction to consider the case, because there was no federal legal issue. The Constitution leaves the counting of votes to the states, and a statute commits challenges finally to the judgment of Congress. Toobin describes the Court's conduct as "inept and unsavory" and says the justices displayed "vanity, overconfidence, impatience, arrogance, and simple political partisanship."[/list]
The last paragraph is particularly appropriate here: a state's procedure for counting votes is uniquely a state matter, not a federal matter (and presidential elections, despite all appearances, are state elections). The supreme court's interference in the recount, which was ordered by the Florida supreme court, clearly constituted the kind of "judicial activism" that conservatives incorrectly assume to be the exclusive province of liberal judges.

Here, let's have that once again.