Florida court to hear Gore appeal
Lieberman says Supreme Court will render ‘final judgment’
MSNBC
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Dec. 5 — Keeping alive Al Gore's White House bid, the Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear his appeal of a lower court's ruling that preserved George W. Bush's victory in the contested presidential race.
IN ANNOUNCING the decision to hear the appeal, Supreme Court spokesman Craig Waters said the seven justices had set a deadline of midday Wednesday for the two sides to file legal papers and would hear arguments at 10 a.m. Thursday.
The announcement does not mean the court has accepted the case, Waters said. Rather, the justices will hear oral arguments, both on the issue of whether to accept the appeal and the facts of the case.
Waters predicted the matter would be quickly resolved. "This is a case that has been certified as a matter of great public importance requiring immediate resolution," he said.
Gore is appealing Monday's ruling by Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who rejected the vice president's request for a manual recount in two counties and to overturn Bush's certified victory in the state, which stands to pick the next president.
At the same time, Gore's lawyers were due to file legal briefs in a second case before the court, a lawsuit filed by Bush that was returned to the court for further consideration Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
COURT OF LAST RESORT
Earlier, Gore's running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, said the Florida Supreme Court will render the "final judgment" on who won the state. Bush, meanwhile, projected the confidence of a winner, saying he hoped to "seize the moment" after taking office.
Lieberman, after meeting Tuesday with Democrats on Capitol Hill, said party leaders continue to support the decision to fight on by taking their challenge to the election results, which was gutted Monday by a state circuit judge, to Florida's highest court.
"They are proud of the race we ran, proud of the principles we ran on ... and confident that a majority of those who went to vote in Florida intended to vote for Al Gore," Lieberman said. "That is the principle we are continuing to pursue in the Florida courts."
Saying that the decision announced Monday by Florida Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls was "wrong on the law," Lieberman said the high court's decision will be "the final judgment" on the matter.
The Republicans, meanwhile, exuded confidence as they waited for the court's judgment.
'A LOT OF WORK TO DO'
"Obviously we've got a lot of work to do," Bush told reporters outside the Texas Capitol in Austin. He said he expected to begin making personnel announcements in short order, although Cabinet appointments are likely to wait until Gore's final legal challenge has been rejected.
Shortly after arriving at the Capitol, Bush received his first intelligence briefing from the CIA. He was to meet later with his prospective national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, also was on Capitol Hill, meeting with the GOP rank and file. He said Bush's transition was "up and running and operational now."
After weeks of fierce post-election combat, Bush and Cheney both seemed to be going out of their way to soften their tone, wishing, perhaps, to grant Gore the room to bow out.
APPEALS COURT ARGUMENTS
Also on Tuesday, Bush's lawyers squared off against the Florida Democratic Party in a federal appeals court in Atlanta.
The court is considering twin lawsuits filed by Bush and three Republican voters from Florida challenging manual recounts on the grounds that they violate constitutional "due process" and equal protection guarantees.
The lawsuit is different from one filed by Bush that argues the Florida Supreme Court intruded on the authority of state legislators when it extended a deadline for certification of election results to allow manual recounts to continue.
In the appeals court, meanwhile, each side was given 30 minutes to make its case before the 12 judges.
Theodore Olson, who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in the other federal case brought by Bush, was again representing the Republican governor.
Atlanta lawyer Theresa Wynn Roseborough, representing the Florida Democratic Party, was arguing against the lawsuit.
No timetable has been set for a decision.
The case before the appeals court was the first lawsuit filed in connection with the disputed Nov. 7 election in Florida, which Bush won by 537 votes according to certified results.
TIME RUNNING OUT
With the deadline for Florida to appoint the 25 electors who will determine the presidency now just a week away, time is rapidly running out for Gore.
The vice president on Monday suffered two serious setbacks in his quest for the White House.
The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in first. Issuing an opinion on Bush's lawsuit, the justices told the Florida Supreme Court to reconsider its decision ordering the state to include presidential ballots manually recounted after Nov. 14, the deadline Florida's secretary of state said was mandated by state law.
The justices did not rule directly on Bush's demand that the recounts be voided, but they challenged the basis of the state Supreme Court's ruling extending the deadline for completion of the recounts until Nov. 26.
The Florida court said it would reconsider the case and ordered lawyers for both candidates to file their briefs by 3 p.m. ET Tuesday.
CRUSHING DEFEAT
The second ruling, delivered later Monday in a state circuit courtroom in Tallahassee, was seen as a crushing defeat even by Gore's legal team.
Judge Sauls rejected the vice president's request for hand recounts of almost 14,000 disputed ballots. "There is no credible statistical evidence ... that the results of the election would have been changed," Sauls said in rejecting every argument Gore's lawyers had made in a marathon hearing over the weekend.
Gore's lawyers immediately turned to a state appeals court, which sent the case directly to the state Supreme Court.
Laurence Tribe, Gore's attorney before the U.S. Supreme Court, saw Sauls' ruling as an enormous blow. "This is obviously a terrible disappointment," Tribe told MSNBC's Lester Holt.
Gore's lead attorney in Florida, David Boies, indicated that the state court is Gore's last hope and that the campaign would accept its judgment as the final word.
"They won. We lost. We're appealing. ... This is going to be resolved by the Florida Supreme Court promptly, and what I think is that that will be the end of the matter," Boies said.
"Whoever wins in the Supreme Court of Florida, we'll accept that."
BUSH TEAM CELEBRATES
The comprehensiveness of Sauls' ruling left Bush's advisers and lawyers jubilant.
"Governor Bush and Secretary [Dick] Cheney won the election," Karen Hughes, Bush's communications director, told reporters in Austin, Texas.
Benjamin Ginsberg, Bush's chief legal counsel in Florida, agreed that "Governor Bush and Secretary Cheney have won Florida," and he again called on Gore to concede the election. "It's time for everyone to do what's in the best interest of the country," he said.
Hughes would not go that far, saying, "It would not be appropriate for me to give the vice president advice."
Anticipating an unfavorable verdict, the Gore campaign worked feverishly ahead of time to keep congressional Democrats from peeling off and abandoning the vice president.
Gore's running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and his campaign manager, William Daley, called Democrats on Capitol Hill to explain the whirlwind legal developments and urge them to remain steadfast.
NBC News correspondent Chip Reid reported from Washington that Gore's aides believed they had managed to hold congressional Democrats' support, at least for now.
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., and Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., said in a joint statement that "we are united in our support of the decision to appeal."
Most important is the support of conservative Democrats in Congress. NBC News' Mike Viqueira reported that the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, many of whom have come under heavy pressure from voters in their districts to urge Gore to concede, were holding firm Monday.
Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, said: "We waited four weeks. We can wait three or four more days."
Text of Judge Sauls' ruling
SAULS: NO JUSTIFICATION FOR RECOUNT
But no one denied that Sauls' ruling cut into the heart of Gore's challenge to the Nov. 7 election results.
Sauls said there was no evidence that 14,000 "undervotes" - ballots that recorded no vote for president — affected the outcome of the race, which Florida declared that Bush won by 537 votes.
"In order to contest election results ... the plaintiff must show that, but for the irregularity or inaccuracy claimed, the result of the election would have been different," Sauls said in reading his ruling from the bench.
Gore failed to prove that, Sauls said.
Sauls said further that there was "no authority under Florida law" to certify an incomplete manual recount or submit returns after a deadline fixed by the state Supreme Court, a vindication of Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who certified Bush as the winner last month.
Sauls also said that while the record shows "voter error and/or less than total accuracy in regard" to the results in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, those problems "cannot support or affect any recounting."
Boies criticized Sauls' reading of the law and said the judge should have looked at some of the disputed ballots for himself before deciding they were irrelevant.
"One of the points we will make on appeal is that ... in an election contest you can't resolve that contest without actually looking at the ballots," he said.
But George Terwilliger, an attorney for Bush, predicted Boies would lose again, calling Sauls' findings "quite remarkable in terms of how sweeping they are."
"The whole country sees we shouldn't be deciding the presidency based on some dimples on a punch card," Terwilliger said in an interview on MSNBC.
U.S. SUPREME COURT WEIGHS IN
Sauls' ruling added significantly to the difficulty of Gore's task, which had already been burdened earlier in the day when the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the disputed election for the first time.
Acting with unusual haste, the nine justices said "there is sufficient reason for us to decline at this time to review" the Florida Supreme Court's order last month that allowed counties to complete hand recounts. In the meantime, it vacated the Florida court's ruling.
In their unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court justices indicated that the state court did not make it clear whether it based its decision on the state Constitution or on state election laws — a key distinction that could justify federal intervention.
Depending on how it is interpreted, Monday's opinion could widen Bush's advantage in Florida from 537 to 930 votes by eliminating the results of hand recounts completed after the Nov. 14 certification deadline. But Boies said such an adjustment would depend on what the state Supreme Court does when it revisits the case.
Text of U.S. Supreme Court's opinion
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
As the election dispute barrels toward a conclusion of some sort, action continued on several fronts:
• A federal judge in Pensacola agreed Monday to hear arguments in a Republican effort to pad Bush's margin by counting ballots from abroad that were rejected for lack of a postmark and other problems, most of them from military voters.
• A lawyer for Democratic voters in Seminole County said 200 absentee ballot request forms to be used as evidence in a lawsuit challenging absentee ballots are missing.
• A Florida circuit judge ordered 10 counties to provide absentee ballot records in response to a separate Democratic challenge to 1,500 absentee votes filed by members of the military. Gov. Jeb Bush filed papers Monday to move the case to federal court.
• Gore's campaign began a new fund-raising effort Monday, posting on its Web site a plea for more money. |
