Interesting article about FSC being an "activist" court....Courts are not supposed to be activist they are supposed to uphold the Constitution.
US news and World Report
Red Queen rules
By Michael Barone
With judicial activists, it's the results that matter most
In the Florida Supreme Court's two decisions in the presidential
election, the American public can see the ugly face of judicial
activism. Rules are ignored, deadlines are changed, and entirely new
laws are written out of thin air. It is the world of Alice's Red Queen:
My will be done. To an extent that the public probably doesn't
understand, judicial activism is an important force in government,
preserved from inspection by the arcana of legal language and by the
reverence with which elites treat the judgments of courts. But here it
is now in Florida, out in the open, for all to see.
The Florida Supreme Court has long been one of the nation's leading
judicial activist courts. It has ruled invalid a law limiting death
penalty appeals because it reduced the power of judges. It struck down
a death penalty constitutional amendment approved by 73 percent of the
voters because the ballot language was supposedly confusing. It barred
from the ballot an initiative banning racial quotas and preferences
because it was supposedly unclear. This is a results-oriented court,
well practiced in the art of manipulating words to get its own way.
Judicial activists often start off by identifying attractive victims and
enunciating attractive principles. The victims in the Florida court's
two cases were people whose votes were supposedly not counted. Then
judicial activists appeal to general principle, often a vague statement
from a state constitution. The Florida court's first, unanimous,
decision in these cases cited language from the Florida Constitution
about the importance of the right to vote. The court noted that the
statute passed by the Legislature gave Secretary of State Katherine
Harris discretion to decide whether to accept hand counts after the
November 14 deadline. Harris set out her grounds for exercising that
discretion, but the court's opinion ignored her explanation and gave no
reasons for saying she abused her discretion. Instead, it waved the
magic wand of the Florida Constitution and said that she was required to
accept the counts.
Vague language. Usually, the invoking of a state constitutional
provision by judicial activists insulates them from U.S. Supreme Court
review. It is hornbook law that state supreme courts are the final
interpreters of state law. But, in fact, judicial activists rely on
vague language to produce concrete results the drafters of the original
language never contemplated.
In New Hampshire, for example, judicial activists read a clause in the
state Constitution promising an "adequate education" as requiring equal
spending in every city and town, and overturned the state system of
education financing that had produced some of the highest test scores in
the nation. In Vermont, judicial activists took language saying
government is "instituted for the common benefit, protection, and
security of the people, nation, or community," and decided that it
required the legislature to pass a law establishing gay marriage or
providing gay couples the same treatment as married couples in state
law.
But the Florida court was unable to use the state Constitution to
rewrite its statutes here. As Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out, the
U.S. Constitution gives the legislature final say over how presidential
electors are selected. In its decision vacating and remanding the
decision of the Florida court, the U.S. Supreme Court tartly noted that
the Florida court may have construed the statute without regard to this
federal constitutional clause; the justices requested clarification.
Astonishingly, the 4-3 Florida court opinion issued late Friday
afternoon does not appear to provide the clarification the U.S. Supreme
Court demanded.
Instead, the Florida court, this time by the narrowest of margins,
pushes aside old rules, sets up new procedures, and further changes
Florida law.
The majority's decision, as Chief Justice Charles Wells wrote in
dissent, "has no foundation in the law of Florida as it existed on Nov.
7, 2000, or at any time until the issuance of this opinion. The
majority returns the case to the circuit court for this partial recount
of undervotes on the basis of unknown or, at best, ambiguous standards
with authority to obtain help from others, the credentials,
qualifications, and objectivity of whom are totally unknown."
Which leads to the final evil of judicial activism: Very simply, it
tends to create chaos. Simple rules and clear deadlines are set aside,
in the name of abstract fairness, so that no one can know the rules and
no deadline counts. The result is the travesty of the hand count in
Broward County, where hundreds of dimpled chads were counted as
votes-which has never before happened in Florida or indeed anywhere but
in 14 counties in Texas and one case in Massachusetts. Some Miami-Dade
ballots were hand counted in Miami one week under one standard, and
others are to be hand counted in Tallahassee by-what standard? Florida
law has been rewritten and rewritten again-with the only guiding
principle being the changes that all seem to help one candidate. The
Red Queen rules-unless the U.S. Supreme Court steps in again and
finally ends the madness.
_______________________________________________________
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone,
and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your
vote is never lost."...................John Quincy Adams
"...it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate,
tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds..."
.....................Mark Laythorpe (until proven otherwise :-))
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce and brave man,
hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join
him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."........Mark Twain
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted
to a sick society."........J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable
one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."...George Bernard Shaw.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."........Benjamin Franklin
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed,
or numbered. My life is my own."...........THE PRISONER
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude
greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in
peace. We seek not your consul, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick
the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and
may posterity forget ye were our countrymen."..........Samuel Adams
"When a well packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to
the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly
preposterous and it's speaker a raving lunatic."........Anonymous
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and thus clamorous to be led to safety), by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."...H.L. Mencken
"You're brought up learning that drugs make you crazy, then you do
marijuana for the first time, and it's not so bad. It's kind of cool.
That's when kids find out it's been a lie."
.............................New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson 10/4/99
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good
example." ............................Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
....................................................George Santayana
>> Put Government On A Diet - Vote Libertarian <<
Freeus |
