Welcome to Florida-gate.
Gridlock is good, you say? I don't think so. Here is a scenario to curl your market maven's hair, and it's not as unlikely as many pundits would like you to believe:
Bush is declared the winner in Florida, but the ongoing hand-recounts show Gore received a clear majority of votes and should have won. The Florida Supreme Court decides Harris' refusal to recognize the recount is a political question; or perhaps it issues an order to Harris to include them in the certification which she blithely ignores. Bush is given the Florida electoral votes, but on January 6 a written protest is filed in Congress (by one Senator and one Congressman, as required). The protest is narrowly rejected along party lines so on January 20 Bush is sworn in as president. He tries to invite a Democrat into some minor cabinet position but only an unknown, discredited political hack like Jeanne Kirkpatrick accepts.
Post-January 20, additional evidence surfaces that Harris and Bush stole the election. Tens or even hundreds of millions of Americans refuse to recognize Bush as the legitimate occupant of the White House. Inevitably, scandals begin to stain the new administration. (Someone once said Republican scandals always involve money and Democratic scandals always involve sex). Perhaps a crisis of domestic or international origin erupts. A low-level congressional inquiry into "Florida-gate" is begun by a minority party member of Congress. Increasingly, every act Bush signs and every federal appointment he tries to make is subjected to political wrangling, legal challenges, civil disobedience, street protests, and more. Supreme Court justices die or become disabled. The court shrinks in size as a divided Senate cannot agree on successors. Greenspan dies or retires and Bush' appointed successor fails to win rapid confirmation.
Finally, one disturbance gets out of control. Federal marshals are used to quell it, leading to more protests against the hijacking of our democratic system, and more instances of federal force, and yet more protests. By '02 all kinds of candidates running for office argue the democratic foundation of the U.S. has been threatened by Bush and what happened in Florida. There is a landslide against Republicans and, just like Nixon in '74-'75, Bush faces a prolonged, public investigation by the new Congress into how he stole the 2000 election and usurped the White House.
I'm not saying all of these things will happen, only that many of them are probable and the rest entirely within the realm of possibility. So, how do you think the market would like this kind of gridlock? |
