The Burden of Florida
The cavalcade of racial injustice that was the Florida recount
By Jack Beatty
The Atlantic Monthly
December 14, 2000
Race and class haunted the Florida recount. Political equality has been
taken away from people whose ancestors died for the right to vote.
According to a Washington Post analysis, the higher the percentage
of black voters in a given precinct, the higher the rate of ballot
rejection. In Jacksonville, a third of the ballots cast in black
precincts were rejected, four times the number in white precincts. The
columnist Arianna Huffington sees a reminder here that "[W]e are
indeed two Americas.... In the precincts of the other America, there were
longer lines, more unreliable voting machines and less access to
technology that instantly identified mismarked ballots and gave voters a
second chance." Even George W. Bush has said this disenfranchisement
should be looked into, after the election, which the U.S. Supreme Court
has now decided. The right to speak and, as the Florida Supreme Court
wrote in its moving opinion that uncounted legal ballots must be counted,
"the right to be heard" have been denied by the verdict of the
conservative majority in Bush v. Gore.
Let's review the cavalcade of injustice, starting with the chief
injusticer, William Rehnquist.
Years before President Nixon put him on the Court, he was a Republican
heavy in Arizona, where he personally challenged black voters at the
polls, much as white officials are reported to have done at polling
places throughout Florida.
Antonin, order over liberty, accelerate death for the disproportionately
high number of African-American men convicted in capital cases and never
mind that their buck-an-hour appointed lawyers fell asleep in court,
Scalia is the mind of the far right. He's all brilliance joined to an
infirm heart.
Clarence Thomas, who never speaks during oral arguments, as if afraid of
betraying his mediocrity, continues to give affirmative action an
undeserved bad name. These three justices, one of whom (Rehnquist) has
said he hopes to retire with Bush in the White House and two of whom
(Scalia and Thomas) have relatives connected to the Bush lawyers or the
Bush transition team, formed the political core of the five-vote majority
finding for Bush, and against Gore, the Florida Supreme Court, and the
people of Florida. To do so, they had to forget all the contumely they
have heaped in past decisions on "judicial activism" and to set
aside the fetish they have long made of federalism.
The Supreme Court should not intervene in matters of state law except
when the majority's presidential candidate needs to win a tainted
victory. Such is the principle established in Bush v.
Gore.
In Florida we have Governor Jeb Bush, who abolished affirmative
action in the state, triggering the mass mobilization of African-American
voters against his brother that Florida's secretary of state sought to
contain by hiring a private company to disqualify them. We have the
redoubtable secretary herself, bidding for her ambassadorship. We have
the anti-democrats in the Florida legislature, eager to nullify the will
of the people and substitute their own. We have the bully boys dispatched
to Florida by Tom DeLay to intimidate the Miami-Dade canvassing board,
paladins of the First Amendment rewarded (or is it punished?) for their
foot-stomping with tickets to hear Wayne Newton. We have the Republican
governors auditioning for parts in the Bush Administration by vilifying
the vote counters, canvassing-board members, voters, and the Florida
Supreme Court. We have old Bob Dole being the old Bob Dole, denouncing
the Broward County counters for "stealing the election." We
have James Baker destroying his reputation. Dragged back into the arena
by the ungrateful Bushes, Baker has made us forget that the political
mechanic blackguarding the Florida judiciary was ever U.S. secretary of
state. The Republicans, who have flourished by depicting Democrats as
elitists, are showing a streak of royalism, throwing popular sovereignty
overboard to elevate George II.
Finally, in history we have the election of 1876 and the Electoral
College. The talking heads have invoked 1876 to make surface parallels to
today. But the significance of 1876 does not lie in the machinations that
brought "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes to the White House. The low deal
cut between the parties ended Reconstruction in the South, leaving newly
enfranchised slaves under the dominion of white-supremacist state
governments that used fraud and terror to keep blacks from voting for the
next ninety years.
Would it be asking too much of the pundits to draw the parallel between
that disenfranchisement and the disenfranchisement in Florida
documented by The Washington Post? Or to remark the sad irony of
the Bush lawyers' using "equal protection of the laws"the pith
of the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment granting the rights of
citizenship to freed slaves, to shut down the recount, when the real
equal-protection violation is that poor and minority districts had to
make do with antiquated voting machines while more affluent districts had
the latest technology?
In the same vein, would it overtax the pontificators' diminished capacity
for depth to stop discussing the Electoral College as if it were the
plumbing of presidential elections and to say the truth, that this is an
institution conceived to preserve and perpetuate slavery? "If the
president was elected simply by the people," the Stanford historian
Jack Rakove writes, explaining the rationale that led the Constitutional
Convention to adopt the Electoral College, "with each qualified
citizen casting a vote, the southern states would be at a serious and
lasting disadvantage because so high a proportion of their population
consisted of African-American slaves who would never vote. In a single
national constituency, comprising voters only, the slaveholding
population of the plantation states would gain no extra boost for owning
property in people."
Robert Frost once said that poetry has only one subject: death. American
history, morally, has only one subject, too, and it shouldn't be left to
Jesse Jackson to say so. The burden of our history is to right the
bestaining wrong of slavery and its afterspread in segregation, juridical
racism, economic marginalization, and the unequal provision of public
services. Florida has added to that burden.
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