Playing With Fire

By ANTHONY LEWIS

ALLAS -- However this presidential conflict ends in the Supreme Court of the United States, it has taken one dangerous turn: the excoriation of the Florida Supreme Court by George W. Bush and his lawyer, James A. Baker III.

When the court decided on the night of Nov. 21 that hand counting of ballots could continue in three Florida counties, Mr. Baker called the decision a "judicial fiat" that "invented a new system for counting the election results." He suggested that the State Legislature would act to overrule the court.

The next day Governor Bush said the court had "usurp[ed] the authority of Florida's election officials." The court "cloaked its ruling in legalistic language," he said. "But make no mistake, the court rewrote the law."

Evidently it was language Bush is incapable of understanding, but he assures us he KNOWS what the court did was wrong. And we should believe him because....???

Those menacing words — usurpation, judicial fiat — recalled a dark episode in our recent history. They were exactly the words used by George C. Wallace and other Southern governors in defying court orders to end racial segregation.

Why do the words matter? Because willingness to abide by decisions of the courts has been an essential element in holding this great, diverse, disputatious country together.

When a court speaks, presidents accept. Harry Truman was unhappy but unquestioningly obeyed when the Supreme Court said he had exceeded his powers in seizing the nation's steel mills to prevent a strike during the Korean War. Richard Nixon obeyed the order to turn over the incriminating Watergate tapes that drove him from the presidency.

So it is dangerous business when a man who would be president tries to delegitimize a court. And it is despicable when a lawyer as senior and powerful as Jim Baker denounces a judicial decision against him and says it will be muscled in the Legislature.

Would we prefer to have legal disputes settled by politicians rather than judges? Would it be more legitimate for this dispute to be decided by a Republican Legislature and a Republican governor who is the candidate's brother?

Long ago this country decided that the third branch of government, the judiciary, was the right place to resolve questions about the law. In 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall put it: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

In this case the Florida Supreme Court followed well-established, traditional methods. There was a conflict between two sets of state statutes: one setting times for certifying election results, the other allowing manual recounts that could not be completed within those times. The court resolved the conflict by allowing a limited extension of time to complete the recounts. It was a minimalist decision, going no further than needed to make coherent sense of the statutory provisions.

Even before the decision, the Bush camp and its supporters tried to delegitimize the Florida Supreme Court. Almost all its members, they noted, had been appointed by previous Democratic governors. But anyone who watched the argument or read the exchanges could see that the judges were struggling without partisanship to make sense of the law — as judges do.

This country has all kinds of elections that are decided on hand recounts. Just now a seat in the Texas Legislature was decided after a recount that considered dimpled chads — under a state law, signed by Governor Bush, that says counters should determine the "intent of the voter."

And just who is twisting things until he gets what he wants?

But Governor Bush and his people have acted as if hand counts in Florida were an affront to decency. There has been a sense of Bush entitlement: "Unless I win, it's improper."

Al Gore has every reason to feel morally secure in pressing the recounts. He had more popular votes nationally than Mr. Bush. Probably at least 30,000 Floridians who voted preferred him but accidentally spoiled their ballots. Officials in Miami-Dade County called off their recount after they felt menaced by a crowd of angry Cuban-Americans and Republican operatives.

The U.S. Supreme Court will now decide whether, and if so how, federal law affects the Florida situation. The end is not yet in sight. But however this does end, we shall be left with the dangerous legacy of a presidential candidate and his lawyer encouraging defiance of a court.

Who is so blind that they cannot see this game that is being played? Bush and his co-horts are telling people what to think. Even here on this board we have had those words repeated back to us, without thought or logical reasoning.

When people parrot what they are fed without appearing to realise what it is they are saying, they have allowed themselves to be brainwashed. It comes from the same kind of stratigy that has made it possible for almost if not everyone on this board over 30 to be able to repeat the McDonalds litteny of two all beef patties, special sauce...... Did you catch yourself finishing it?

That is because it was created specifically to cause you to remember it without thinking about exactly what it is you are talking about. Just like all the bull the Bush camp and repugs are saying over and over to every media outlet until it gets drilled into everyones heads where they accept it as fact.

And this fron tb2ku~~

Further details are emerging about the riot in Miami on Wednesday that preceded the Miami-Dade County election commission's decision to give up recounting the votes in the presidential election. As election workers sat counting votes, a mob screamed outside, pounded on furniture, tried to force its way into the building, surrounded a Democratic Party official, knocked two television cameramen to the ground, and kicked and punched several people, including a Democratic spokesman as he attempted to hold a news conference (New York Times 11/23/00 and 11/24/00).

The Republicans initially asserted that the riot was nothing but a spontaneous outburst, but it soon became evident that this was not true. In a report that is almost too bizarre to believe, ABC News (11/24/00) reports that the riot in Miami "was an organized Republican Party protest, run by 75 party operatives out of a headquarters in a motor home". One operative claimed that they were there to help the media. But, ABC News reports, "they also got directly involved in leading demonstrations, and were even willing to dress up in seasonal outfits to provide so-called protester color for local news reports".

The protests were clearly organized in some depth. Some participants had heard about them from a Republican phone bank, and others in the Cuban-American community had heard about them from radio interviews with Republican members of Congress. A lawyer for the Republican Party incited the rioters by asserting that the election commission would not be counting predominantly Hispanic districts (New York Times 11/24/00).

Now, one might imagine that the Republicans had organized a crowd of protesters that had simply gotten out of control. Some of them even claimed as much. But an op-ed column by Paul Gigot in the 11/24/00 Wall Street Journal column, which openly supports the riots, gives this account of how they started:

Then the Three Counting Sages repaired to semi-isolation, forcing TV cameras to watch through a window and keeping reporters 25 feet away. That did it. Street-smart New York Rep. John Sweeney, a visiting GOP monitor, told an aide to "Shut it down", and semi- spontaneous combustion took over.

This is the most astonishing thing that I have ever read. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a United States Congressman explicitly ordered a gang to attack the offices of an election commission with the express purpose of shutting down the counting of votes in a presidential election.

What is going on in these people's minds? Some Republicans tried to justify the violence by comparing it to protests that have been organized by the Democrats. The same lawyer who had helped incite the crowd in Miami asserted that "[i]t's the same type of democracy in action when Jesse Jackson parachutes in and starts a protest in the black community. People have a right to express their opinions" (New York Times 11/24/00).

But this is over the top. Jesse Jackson organized peaceful protests in Florida until he was heckled off the stage by Republican counterprotesters. The NAACP organized a civilized public hearing and submitted a report on its findings to the Justice Department. That is indeed democracy. Violence is not.

Representative Sweeney, who ordered the attack on the government building where the votes were being counted said this: "thugs in that building are trying to hijack this election". This utterance is very disturbing. It's totally backward. Representative Sweeney commanded a mob that violently attacked people in the election commission's building, yet he asserted that county workers who were counting votes under the supervision of Republican and Democratic observers were "thugs". And he explicitly ordered his violent followers to shut down the counting of votes, yet he asserted that the election commission was "hijacking" the election.

This is called projection: attacking people while falsely accusing them of accusing you.

Projection is also at the core of Paul Gigot's staggering column in the Wall Street Journal. His argument, in brief, is that the rioters -- he uses the word "riot" explicitly -- had been provoked to their marching and chanting by the supposed injustices of the vote count. He does not dwell on the details of kicks and punches and tramplings and menacings and false accusations, playing the whole thing as mild comedy, even though Video of the riot at the ABC News Web site makes plain what a distortion this is. These genteel rioters, he says, "let it be known that 1,000 local Cuban Republicans were on the way" -- an assertion that could not have sounded very peaceable to election commissioners who were already faced with a screaming mob. It was then, he says, that the commissioners "caved", and he makes clear that, in his view, the commissioners' decision was largely a result of the protests. At no point does he express the slightest disapproval.

Like Sweeney, Gigot manages his equanimity through projection: the commission proceedings, he bemusedly tells us, were "bad enough to inspire 50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermes ties to behave, well, like Democrats". Like Democrats. Perhaps readers of the Wall Street Journal regard it as a commonplace that the Democratic party organizes riots to shut down the counting of votes in a presidential election. No. What's really going on here is a cycle of projection that has escalated to the point of insanity.

The Republicans are delaying the vote count and complaining that it is taking too long,

disrupting it and claiming that it is chaotic,

claiming to represent the will of the voters will preventing the many ballots which were not successfully read by the machines from being counted,

and generally accusing their opponents of everything that they are doing. Even if something was legally wrong with the proceedings at the Miami Government Center, the way to resolve the problem is not by kicking people, punching them, knocking them over, and issuing threats. This is a democracy. And it should stay that way.

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2000