Supreme Court Hands Democrats an Issue The Can Run With (long)

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Supreme Court Hands Democrats an Issue They Can Run With

David S. Broder of the Washington Post, December 13, 2000

Five weeks after Election Day, the Supreme Court last night apparently handed Texas Gov. George W. Bush the key to the White House. But the first reaction in the political world was that the vote-counting controversy that split the court into warring factions will give the Democrats an issue they are certain to trumpet over the coming months and years.

The high court, its ideological divisions in startlingly public display, seemed to shut down almost all Vice President Gore's plausible options for overturning Bush's narrow lead in Florida, leaving the way clear for the final certification by the Republican secretary of state and perhaps the Republican-controlled Legislature of the 25 electoral votes that will make Bush the winner.

Several Democrats said Gore had no choice but to concede. But many others said they would await Gore's action, and the vice president postponed any statement of his own until today.

Republicans were careful not to claim it was over. Former secretary of state James A. Baker III, overseeing Bush's legal strategy, said the Texas governor and his running-mate, Richard B. Cheney, were "pleased and gratified" by the ruling. But Baker did not issue a victory claim.

The late-night Supreme Court action, a basic ruling accompanied by a welter of concurring and dissenting opinions, confounded many politicians, who took the safe course of delaying any public statements.

But in private comments, they pointed to the paradox of the dramatic political scene. Republicans have won full control of the federal government--the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives--for the first time in the almost half-century since Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1952.

But, on the other hand, the Democrats have an exceptionally strong base from which to launch a comeback drive in 2002 and 2004. And now they have an issue that can motivate their constituents to action--the claim that Bush won the White House by questionable means.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said, "This is an ending that is likely to exacerbate the bitterness. While Democrats will certainly respect the authority of the court, this decision will leave a lot of Democrats feeling that this was not a fair outcome. It will make divisions harder to heal. I think the court may have put a huge burden on Bush."

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been particularly angry about the barriers they said African American voters ran into at the Florida polls and have cited studies showing that the "undercount" of ballots, with no presidential vote recorded by the tabulating machines, was unusually heavy in black precincts.

Last night, Jesse L. Jackson, who led protest demonstrations in Florida, told the Associated Press that civil rights groups would obtain access to the disputed Florida ballots through the state's open-records law. "No matter who the Supreme Court crowns, we will know before January 20th that Gore got most of the votes," he said.

If the Democrats want to claim that their nominee was jobbed, they can find plenty of support in the dissenting opinions in last night's decision. They argued, in effect, that if the Supreme Court's conservative bloc, which halted the just-started hand-count of votes in a 5-4 ruling on Saturday, had just let it proceed, the results could have been determined to everyone's satisfaction.

Justice John Paul Stevens, a Republican appointee who often sides with two Clinton-appointed justices in a liberal bloc, said the ruling by "the majority of this court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land."

The words of Stevens and of another Republican justice, David H. Souter, will likely become slogans for Democrats eager to discredit the legitimacy of Bush's claim to the White House. Some Democrats were talking privately last night of how that comeback campaign can be organized.

But for the moment, there was disarray at the top of the Democratic Party. General Chairman Edward J. Rendell, the former mayor of Philadelphia, told TV interviewers that "Gore should act now and concede, and I think he will." But the man who runs the Democratic National Committee's day-to-day operations, Chairman Joe Andrew, called Rendell's statement "outrageous" and said the official party position remained that all the Florida votes should be counted.

While Gore and his lawyers were still pondering their options in a post-midnight session at the vice president's official residence, some of the more media-oriented members of Congress were throwing in the towel. "That's checkmate," said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.). "Gore will have to concede at this point." Sen. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) said he expected Gore "to be gracious" and give up.

But most Democrats said they wanted to let Gore make that decision before commenting themselves. And shortly before midnight, Gore campaign chairman William Daley said Gore and Lieberman were still studying the decision and would not comment until today.

Republicans, who believed that Bush had secured the vital 25 Florida electoral votes on the basis of two machine counts and a partial hand count, certified by the Florida secretary of state, were cautious about claiming a final victory. But with the court majority saying the constitutional and practical barriers to more vote counting are insuperable, the GOP could see the end of the line--at least for 2000.

If the ruling apparently settled the identity of the next president, it left unanswered all the issues about public acceptance of the result and the reaction of the Democrats whose help Bush will need to pass any major legislative initiatives.

The latest polls taken before the decision showed that more people thought Bush than Gore had won and expected to see Bush declared the winner. But those polls also showed continued strong public support for counting Florida ballots as fully and accurately as possible.

Traditionally, Americans tend to rally around a new president, even if the result is close, and the inaugural ceremony has found recent presidents enjoying approval ratings in the mid-to-high 50s. But there is no modern precedent for a campaign so close that it was not decided for more than a month after Election Day.

While the immediate reaction of most Democrats suggested that Gore would have to give up, there was equally a determination that the issues raised in the recount not be quickly shelved.

Democrats came out of the 2000 election with gains in both the House and Senate, and are counting on the traditional mid-term gains for the opposition party to give them a good chance of securing majorities in both those chambers in 2002.

But Republicans, at least for the moment, are enjoying the prospect of controlling the White House, the Senate and House for the first time in almost 50 years.

Whatever the residue of bitterness from this extraordinary election, the bottom line is: A Bush victory and a Republican-dominated national government.

(c) Washington Post, 2000

-- I'm Here, I'm There, (I'm Everywhere,@So.Beware), December 13, 2000

Answers

Ah, David Broder... a man who can almost disguise sniveling as prose.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), December 13, 2000.

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