At 10:40 PM 1/13/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 09:23 PM, John Kelsey wrote:
...
That's not the way it looked to me. My impression was that both sides were willing to do anything that wouldn't actually get them thrown in jail to sway the outcome of the election, but that Bush had been dealt a better hand. The Florida court decision (with a big Democratic majority) went for the Democrats, the SC decision (with a Republican majority) went for the Republicans. Essentially everyone involved made decisions that were in the interests of their party winning the presidency. But seeing the SC make a highly-political decision that upset so many Democrats was entertaining, given the usual pattern of Conservatives complaining about activist, politicized courts, while Liberals explain that the Constitution needs to be "interpreted" in light of current events. (Note that with a more Conservative court, we can expect this pattern to reverse, just as Conservatives were complaining about too much Presidential power during the Clinton administration, but in favor of greater Presidential power in the Reagan and Bush years.)Personally, I was shocked, *shocked*, to see the supreme court make a decision on the basis of politics instead of a careful reading of the constitution.Everything the Supreme Court did in the 2000 election was fully justified. The Dems lost, then tried to change the rules.
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I'm not happy with Bush, to repeat this mantra that Gore/Lieberman actually won is knavish at best.That's not what I said at all. (And for what it's worth, I don't think Gore would be doing very much differently right now. It's not like Bush is sitting around, coming up with proposals for added surveilance and security on his own--these are recommendations from various parts of the bureaucracy, and those recommendations carry a lot of weight because nobody wants to be seen to have ignored the next set of warnings.)
--Tim May
--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
