To: Hawkmoon who wrote (8646 ) 12/9/2000 10:32:34 PM From: Hawkmoon Respond to Interesting commentary on the USSC stay on the recount:msnbc.com Trial lawyers have carried this legal offensive in recent years from unpopular products such as tobacco and guns to latex gloves, breast implants and now presidential elections. It should now be obvious to most people that the Rule of Trial Lawyers isn’t a good substitute for the Rule of Law. A MAJORITY of the Supreme Court has clearly had enough. The court had shown great restraint in dealing with the Florida Supreme Court’s original opinion allowing manual recounts in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. Its unanimous opinion vacated the state court’s legally ambitious ruling, but allowed it finish its homework and come back with a better explanation for why it didn’t intrude on federal law. it is entirely unclear that the “undervotes” the court ordered recounted were valid votes. Such ballots had never before been counted in Florida and curiously the court chose not to count “overvotes,” or ballots where someone may have voted for president and then written in a candidate’s name or where the machine might have accidentally counted a second punched vote. Before such votes were counted, it would help if we knew they were legal.Justice Antonin Scalia addressed that issue in the court’s stay of the Florida recounts: “Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.” The high court’s stay was necessary to make sure that the office of president continues to have legitimacy and not be subject to a possible endless dispute between those who favored the original machine counting method and certification and those who embraced a different vote total using counting methods that varied greatly from county to county. The court may now believe that preserving democratic legitimacy requires the rare spending of some of its carefully husbanded political capital, even if the ultimate decision is only five to four. But after all, the lawyers for Al Gore embraced the Florida’s Supreme Court ruling of Friday as “wholly legitimate,” even though it was only a 4-3 vote, with an outraged Chief Justice Charles Wells filing an anguished dissent that one court observer said read “like a hostage note asking the judicial Marines to come and rescue the court from the inmates that had taken over the asylum.” What has the Supreme Court stay and decision next week likely saved the country from? The Rule of Trial Lawyers. The peculiar and unique world view that trial lawyers have is that the rules of the game can always be shifted to the benefit of their clients. Nothing is secure, nothing is impossible if a clever enough argument and the right of circumstances can be created.Indeed, it’s worth noting that three of the four justices who voted for Al Gore’s “adventures in recounting” on Friday had been personal-injury trial lawyers.
