To: Lane3 who wrote (8847 ) 12/13/2000 4:33:00 PM From: Math Junkie Respond to "The legislature wrote a general standard, so general that it would inevitably lead to different interpretations, so obviously inevitable that one can reasonably conclude that must have been the legislative intent. The USSC says that the standard is whatever the legislature says it is. The counties inevitably proceed in varying ways within that general standard and the FLSC ratifies what the counties did. Let's review. The legislature has the authority to set the standard and it did. The counties followed the standard. The FLSC ratified what the counties did. Now how did the USSC conclude that the FLSC overstepped? If the USSC has heartburn over the vagueness of the standard, then they should fault the legislature for not providing a more specific one, not the FLSC for deferring to the path legally set by the legislature. "only provision of the U.S. Constitution that applied. In fact, in the first case, they specifically stated that Federal law (3 U. S. C. §5) needed to be considered. So I think that one mistake that the majority in the Florida Supreme Court made was to be so cowed by the U.S. Court's earlier remand that they interpreted it to mean that they couldn't change what the legislature had done in any way, for any reason, and thus they overlooked or underestimated the applicability of Federal equal protection requirements.
