Kevin points out Michael Kinsley's protest that reasonable people could not agree with the Bush legal position post-election:
[December 22, 2000]
News flash to every C-Span caller who says "The exit polls were right the first time." They were wrong.
2.8 percentage points of Gore's projected lead was inflated by problems with the exit polls, specifically the sampling of voters in the group's 45 selected precincts. The report says this degree of error is "within the normal range" for exit polls. The remaining 3.2 percentage points of the Gore lead were due to flaws in the exit poll "model" itself. One of VNS's key techniques is to compare its exit-poll findings to the results of past elections.
Next time we have an election, anyone who encounters these charlatans should do the country a favor and tell them to take a flying leap. W
Pardon me - I thought those stamps were mine. W
I always find it creepy when a search for my name turns up in the referrer logs. If you're looking for me, just drop me a line, ok? W
Kevin points out Michael Kinsley's protest that reasonable people could not agree with the Bush legal position post-election:
[Kinsley:] The right to vote and have your vote count seems like an appropriate, or at least explainable, basis for passion. But where do you honestly get passionate intensity about defending the web of technicalities used to defeat that right?
One person's "web of technicalities " is another's principled defense of fundamental rights. Just ask anyone who's ever had a conviction reversed due to the Miranda decision. In this case, I agree that reasonable people could differ as to the constitutionality of the Florida recount - after all, even the Supreme Court differed on it by a count of 7 -2. Once you get past that, however, everything else flows logically and consistently from that.
The Supreme Court, once it determined that there was a "substantial probability" that the vote counting in the election for our nation's President violated the Constitution, it had an obligation to stop that recount until a final decision had been made. Any holder of public office, sworn to uphold the Constitution, having the power to stop an unconstitutional action, who fails to do so has breached their primary duty to the nation.
The fundamental flaw in Kinsley's analysis - which renders him wrong, but not unreasonable - is that he doesn't even attempt to understand the possibility that a recount would be flawed. Yet two justices widely regarded as "liberal" joined with two usually considered the "swing" and three often blasted as "arch-conservative" to arrive at that conclusion. (Souter and Breyer, O'Connor and Kennedy, and Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, respectively.) If this position is so unreasonable, then how did such a broad coalition of justices embrace it? W
[December 21, 2000]
The headline speaks for itself: Florida probe finding no evidence of black disenfranchisement.
"A lot of these problems can be attributed to the first-time voters, who weren't familiar with the process." - Allison K. Bethel, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (Florida)
I believe, but am not sure, that Ms. Bethel, who was appointed by Democratic Attorney General Bob Butterworth, is black. W
Two adjacent Yahoo headlines:
Bush Team Defends Economic Slowdown Remarks
U.S. Economy Shows More Signs of Losing Steam W
[December 20, 2000]
If school voucher programs are unconstitutionally favorable to parochial schools, the Washington Post suggests the answer:
In other words, even if the 6th Circuit decision is right, the lesson is not that voucher systems are inherently flawed and experiments with them should be abandoned. It may be, paradoxically, that these programs must be ambitious in order to pass muster.
If the teacher's unions are pitted against not only conservatives, but a large majority of disadvantaged parents and even the Post's editorial board, could the unions possibly be wrong? W
CNET offers Music Litigation: The Year in Review. Have I mentioned I LOVE working on this stuff? W
[December 19, 2000]
It’s been days now and there’s no sign of Supreme Court hysteria wearing off. I guess I won’t really be surprised if the Lefties keep screaming until President Bush’s re-election in 2004. What is surprising, however, is the range of otherwise intelligent individuals who elbow each other out of the way to hurl foaming invective at the U.S. Supreme Court, nasty names usually reserved for Scalia and Thomas alone.
Of course, there are the usual suspects, like Jesse Jackson, the New York Times, and the MeFi crowd. Jackson went so far as to call Clarence Thomas a liar on Sunday’s Meet the Press:
But none of us really believe what [Thomas] just said.
This was in response to Justice Thomas' statement that the Court never considers politics. I’m tempted to call the Reverend for his intellectual dishonesty, but that’s like accusing Netscape of abusing its dominant market share. No, Reverend Jackson’s self-serving position on this one is no surprise, nor that of the chattering nabobs.
What truly baffles me are the liberals who clearly understand the court’s stated reasoning and still insist that partisan politics is the only means to produce that jurisprudential result. To plumb this deeper, we need to understand the opinion a little better. The court decided three legal issues:
The second item is the weakest leg of this tripod. Did the manual recount violate due process and equal protection? As any legal scholar knows, these are fuzzy concepts on the best of days and the ones most susceptible to ideological bias. One would think that the liberal left would delight in this court’s expansion of equal protection precedent and the reaffirmation of voting as a fundamental right. Instead, they attack it as a “partisan” ruling that “stole” the election from Gore. One big problem with that theory – the equal protection argument was driven hardest by those well-known right-wing hacks, Breyer and Souter. Ooops.
Once you accept that the recount violated the U.S. Constitution, the other results flow logically from that. The initial order? No harm done, since any count performed would have to be discarded anyway as unconstitutional. Create a new standard and extend the deadline to Dec. 18? No way – that is as clearly outside the U.S. Supreme Court’s powers as the extension of the state deadline was for the Florida Supreme Court. The high court has only the power to say “yea” or “nay” as to the legality of the state’s procedures – it cannot alter them. Once the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state deadline was Dec. 12, the U.S. Supreme Court was powerless to change that ruling. It could only decide whether Florida’s procedures met constitutional muster. It weighed them and found them wanting.
Some liberals understand this. Kevin points out a Nat Hentoff column in the Village Voice in which the author proclaims, “Scalia was right!” He means, of course, that Florida’s recount procedures were unconstitutional. Hentoff even digs up a juicy Stevens opinion from 1983 that pooh-pooh’s the state’s right to regulate presidential elections.
It is clear that reasonable people can disagree with the court’s holding without resorting to partisan grounds. But there are folks who ought to know better – like Kevin, who I assume understands Hentoff’s argument – who insist that the court’s action must have been partisan. Maybe Scalia and Rehnquist were more than happy to go along with the ride, but there are solid legal grounds for its holding. No 7 - 2 ruling of the court which splits the two Democratic appointees on the bench (Ginsburg and Breyer) can seriously be called partisan. If anything, I think there’s a stronger concern that Stevens and Ginsburg turned their backs on an equal protection argument they might have fully embraced under other circumstances, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. To call the court’s action partisan is to assume that the court could not have, in good conscience, found solid legal grounds upon which to decide as they did. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the final result, that’s a pretty hard pill to swallow. W
Site news: I tweaked the Portal this evening. Updated a few links, got rid of the curly brackets, knocked the whole thing on its side. Maybe more changes to come. Enjoy. W
The Washington Post profile on dry college fraternities drew a surprising amount of attention online, mostly from skeptics. As fraternity alumnus myself, I know that college fraternities have to change or die. While I don't think prohibition is the answer, I know that almost every single fraternal organization is making an enormous effort to change their cultures through emphasizing the fraternal, rather than social, nature of their organizations. Dry housing is just one tool to be used in that aim - it is also important for fraternities to actively recruit college students who are interested in doing something beyond the bottom of the next beer glass. Some are taking that challenge face-on. The others won't be around in ten years. W
From Dan, source of cool stuff: Adobe's PDF-to-HTML converter. W
[December 18, 2000]
[December 17, 2000]
Just a bookmark: REDIRECTION.net - Domain Name Redirection Service. W