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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (8811)	12/13/2000 4:11:18 AM
From: ColtonGang	Respond to of 10042

NYTIMES analysis.........The court provided no clear, unanimous validation of the electoral process. Its extraordinarily complex ruling led to widespread confusion in the first few minutes after it was issued, and it may well provide ammunition in the months ahead for embittered supporters of Vice President Al Gore, whose chances seemed to have been sorely and in all probability fatally damaged. Nor was there any certainty that the Democrats would refrain from further challenges, either in the courts or in the halls of Congress. One possible line of attack is the Florida Legislature's actions to choose electors. But there was no clear avenue for further legal maneuvering by the Gore team. "I had hoped that the court would bring the country together," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. "I had hoped that it would send a clear message, but that does not appear to have happened." One of Mr. Gore's confidants described the court's opinion as "confusing but devastating." Some backers, including Edward G. Rendell, the general chairman of the Democratic party, and Laurence H. Tribe, one of Mr. Gore's top lawyers, said it was time for the vice president to concede, but some others disagreed. James A. Baker III, Mr. Bush's chief spokesman in the Florida fight, confined himself to a statement of pleasure, without appearing triumphant and without putting any pressure on Mr. Gore to quit the contest. In reversing the order of the Florida Supreme Court, the court came down on the side of Governor Bush. With less than a week remaining until the Electoral College is to cast its votes, the justices in the core ruling that the Florida court was wrong to order a recount found a way to speak with one voice, avoiding a contentious split, but no sooner had they done so than they started bickering again among themselves. Still, beneath the welter of verbiage, the same five justices who had voted on Saturday to halt a partial recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court remained convinced that the court's recount plan was unconstitutional. As a formality, Washington bucked the question back to Tallahassee. In theory, the jurists in the District of Columbia told those in Florida, "Find a new recount system if you can." But what the majority gave with one hand, it took away with the other, suggesting that as a practical matter time had already expired to do so. The reason: they said that the deadline was today, rather than Dec. 18, when the electors will meet to cast their ballots. Politically, Mr. Bush seemed to have won the decisive struggle of the war. But the ruling did little to dispel the fog of electoral battle. It was clear from the stinging dissents that bracketed the per curiam opinion that the Supreme Court had had a difficult time with what the court described as "an unsought responsibility" to play referee. Justice John Paul Stevens in particular said that the court had wounded itself and the reputation of all the nation's courts, though he asserted that "time will one day heal the wound." Justice Stephen Breyer said the court had failed to restrain itself and argued that it would have been wiser not to do what it did tonight. Fifty-four years ago, in Colegrove v. Green, a case involving a question of allegedly inequitable Congressional apportionment in Illinois, Justice Felix Frankfurter coined a famous phrase. The court, he wrote, must not enter "a political thicket" by seeking to intrude on state political matters. In the case of Baker v. Carr only a decade later, the high court ignored Mr. Frankfurter's advice and plowed straight into that thicket, never to emerge, and in tonight's decision it appeared to have plunged in more deeply.