Let's Go For The Whole Banana

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OK, I'm impatient too. But. The election thing, having dragged this far and hitting the USSC twice, offers a visit to the even more important fight twixt legislative or judicial rule. Poole woke me to this. We've a chance here to redress some 30 years of judicial activism and a better chance for a showdown probably won't come in our lifetimes.

To me it's evident that the judicary, counter to our constitution, makes the rules that run our lives and so am hoping the USSC sides with Gore tomorrow. Then let the real game begin with the Florida legislature sending its own slate of delegates. Don't be scared.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), December 12, 2000

Answers

Carlos, I disagree. This should be settled by the Supreme Court--not by the Florida Legislature or Congress. Votes by those bodies would almost certainly divide according to party lines.

The Supreme Court is the only institution which can make a judgement that won't be viewed as being strictly political. Whoever wins, Bush or Gore, needs to win because of justice rather than politics.

I think the Supreme Court already made it clear Saturday with its 5-4 stay that Bush will be taking office in January. Be thankful that this (probably) is ending in the Supreme Court and not in Congress.

If the Florida Legislature sends its own slate of electors even though Gore wins a statewide, Supreme Court approved recount with uniform standards, there could be a battle in Congress in early January that could rip this country in half.

We don't want to go there. Trust me.

-- Careful what (you@ask.for), December 12, 2000.


This country will be ripped in half by communist subterfuge, either by this election or some other unforeseen event.

United we stand, divided we fall...

-- dinosaur (dinosaur@williams-net.com), December 12, 2000.


Lock and load.

-- Porky (Porky@in.cellblockD), December 12, 2000.

'SUMER! Where do you keep the kevlar vests?

-- helen (a@c.k), December 12, 2000.

Dinosaur-

Fear of "the red menace" is so very retro.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), December 12, 2000.



Helen, I moved the kevlar vests to the storage room next to the kitchen. They were downstairs, but we had to put Andy Ray in the basement storage room because it had the biggest drain. He was pissing on the carpet (since pulled up and changed to no-wax flooring).

-- (reven@never.more), December 12, 2000.

ROFLMAO, at the above.

Helen, I'll brave it and go to the cellar and KICK AR out of the way.

Hey, I DID take tae kwon doo.

swivels around on stool and manages to get to her feet and heads toward the cellar. ;-0

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), December 12, 2000.


Be careful down there. You might also run into Squid, as in Squid- it's-dark-down-here.

-- (raven@never.more), December 12, 2000.

Careful:

I hope you're kidding here. The selection of a President is a strictly partisan process. These candidates are the exemplars, the very embodiment of partisan politics. That's their JOB!

The courts try very hard to avoid "political thickets" and, at least in theory, to avoid excessive activism. Activism blurs the line between interpreting existing law, and making new law. Lawmaking is necessarily a partisan process. This is why we vote for those whose policies we like, and against those who want what we don't.

So the Supreme Court deciding the President is dangerously inappropriate. Political offices should be filled through political processes, and NOT judicial processes.

If the people vote the candidates into an effective tie (and they have, within any possibility of measurement), then selecting between them MUST be done politically, and NOT judicially. The people dropped the ball, so the job goes to *elected* representatives, *partisan* politicians, to fill a partisan position.

Believe me, having judges intrude into a strictly political issue and make a *necessarily* partisan decision is the worst thing that could happen to the courts. Besides, I'd like my President decided by the representatives I elected directly.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 12, 2000.


A Zimbabwe politician has been quoted as saying that children should study this year's U.S. presidential election closely, because it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena.

In that spirit, consider the recent proceedings from a slightly different perspective:

1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).

2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's past.

3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory' hinged on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother.

4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

5. Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.

6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.

7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 300 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.

8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.

9. Imagine that the self-declared winner was himself the governor of a major province, which had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and which actually led the nation in executions.

10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

11. Imagine that the election was called on election night for the presumptive winner by the winner's first cousin, himself a conservative demagogue, at a right-wing "news" organization.

Few of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.

THIS REMINDS ME OF GANDHI'S REPUTED RESPONSE TO QUESTION POSED BY A BRITISH JOURNALIST AFTER GANDHI RETURNED FROM A TOUR OF EUROPEAN CAPITALS.

"What," he was asked, "do you think about Western Civilization?"

"I think," he replied, "it would be a very good idea."

-- Goodbye, USA (nice@knowing.ya), December 12, 2000.



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