On Voting Republicans Out Of Office

"The Betrayal of America" by Vincent Bugliosi | The Dubya Report
www.thedubyareport.com/betrayal.html
... U.S. Supreme Court's unprecedented intrusion into politics that ... crime to steal a presidential ... that the Florida Supreme Court had permitted ...

THE FOUNDATION FOR LAW, JUSTICE AND SOCIETY

Courts and the Making of Public Policy
Bush v. Gore and the 2000
US Presidential Election
Executive Summary

■ The US Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, which effectively ended the 2000 presidential election, provoked a profound national debate about the role of the judiciary in resolving political disputes and raised still lingering questions about the Supreme Court’s credibility as a nonpartisan institution.
■ The Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 presidential election was unique in American history. Until 2000, the Court had never been involved in a presidential vote count.
■ The Court’s decision to halt the ongoing and potentially dispositive recount in Florida was unnecessary, and its reasons for doing so were unpersuasive. The fact that the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore was decided by a narrow 5–4 majority, divided along the Court’s conservative–liberal axis, lent support to the claim that the outcome was result-oriented and ideologically driven.
■ The majority in Bush v. Gore invited this criticism for several reasons. Its decision was a departure from the Court’s traditional practice of allowing votecounting disputes to be resolved at the local level. Its intrusion into the details of Florida’s recount was inconsistent with the Court’s then-prevailing
philosophy in favour of state’s rights. Its concern about equal voting rights was selective. It expressed no concern, for example, about the use of different voting machines with different records for accuracy throughout Florida and the nation. It complained about the lack of standards governing the recount but gave the Florida courts no opportunity to remedy the problem. And, it specifically declined to announce any general principle of law beyond the result in this particular case.
■ The lesson to be drawn from Bush v. Gore is not that electoral disputes, even presidential election disputes, are beyond judicial competence. Elections are partisan contests governed by what should ideally be nonpartisan rules. Courts have a role in enforcing those rules to ensure a fair election. But courts must exercise that authority carefully and wisely. Bush v. Gore failed that test.