Perhaps to hawk a book on the topic, this question seems to be all over the news today. The question doesn't involve which way the Supremes should have voted. The question involves whether the Supremes should have accepted the case at all.

How does one explain this to Russian judges?

Personally, the thing that bothered me most about the decision was the statement that this decision did NOT establish a precedent. This was to be a "in this case only" thing. When was THAT ever done before?

Was the decision politically motivated? MSNBC has a poll that one can use to answer that one. MY question to you is whether you think they should have even taken the case. Yes? No?

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), September 10, 2001

Answers

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-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), September 10, 2001.

No.

The issue should have been decided by the legislative branch, which has the Constitutional authority to oversee elections. By giving up that right (primarily because they were too chicken to do otherwise), a very dangerous precedent has been set.

I would rather Gore had won by a vote of Congress than for Bush to have won the way he did. The long term damage to the separation of powers is impossible to determine, but I believe it'll become apparent in the years to come.

-- Stephen M. Poole (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), September 10, 2001.

And Gore is to blame for this.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), September 10, 2001.

Gore still had legal avenues to pursue which could have placed the vote in congress. He chose not to do so.

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), September 10, 2001.

Given the equal protection issues, and the fact that the Florida Supreme Court had pointedly failed to address them, I think the USSC had to accept the case and stop the ongoing recount. Whether they should have ruled out any further recounts... that's a more debatable issue.

I do have a problem with the "non-precedent" bit, and the decision is badly written. Nothing to be particularly proud of there.

I have two problems with the story:

One - The constant harping on the equal protection argument without noting that the Supreme Court vote on the equal protection issue was 7-2, *not* 5-4.

Quoting the article, "The equal-protection stuff? That was the best he could come up with on short notice." Dishonest at best.

Two - Quoting again, "They’d find an equal-protection violation, send the case back to the Florida justices to fix standards and administer the best recount they could under the circumstances...", not mentioning that *they'd already done exactly that*!!

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), September 10, 2001.

7-2? I thought that was the ruling by the Florida Supremes. I hate to think that I must go back and read the rulings by the US Supremes to see if one specific area had more backing than another.

Right now, I'm going to agree with Stephen. Bush would still be in the White House, because the Florida Congress would have voted him in, but the US Supreme Court wouldn't have made any political decision.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), September 10, 2001.

Buddy, I think because Gore knew he couldn't win that way. He gave up the fight. But it was Gore who first took the bloody mess to court in the first place. He forced it to go up through the courts. Bush was still having his morining breakfast while Gore had 50 lawyers descend on Florida. Then as Randy points out, the US court had to try to correct the injustice imposed by the FL court. They were forced into it by the mess the FLSC made.

The 'what if' proposition put forth by this article is as worthless as any doomer scenario. Yeah, if I had just another 24 hours, I could make all things right too!

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), September 11, 2001.