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Pastimes : What Can We Do To Bring The Country Back Together? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (106)	12/15/2000 4:33:25 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 181

I doubt very much that Ruth Bader Ginzburg was the right woman for the job. Putting Thomas on the bench was a political sop. All political appointments are political in nature. If you studied legal theory, you'd know that there are different schools and that some schools are popular with liberals and some schools are popular with conservatives. Someone whose political philosophy favors a strong federal government is going to rule differently than someone who doesn't. Scalia is a textualist. He follows the text of the law. The text of the law is what is written by legislatures. He is philosophically deferential to legislatures, and believes in the separation of powers. If you weren't a computer geek, but a law geek, you'd get that. You might not agree with the way he came out, but if you understood textualism, you'd understand why he ruled as he did. The subtlety that you are missing is WHY the argument played right into Scalia's beliefs. Bush's arguments were carefully crafted to be right up Scalia's alley. It would be insane to argue textualism to Ginzburg. She's not a textualist. Gore's lawyers did not do a good job of pitching to the middle. They understood that the Court would be deferential to the state, but they didn't understand that it would be deferential to the legislature, not the State Supreme Court. When they lost Kennedy and O'Connor, they were damned. Boies statement that he thought the standard of looking at ballots could vary from individual to individual was an unbelieveable blunder. So was his concession that he'd never thought about whether it was a violation of 3 USC 5 for the Florida Supreme Court to change the law. That was why they were there, for heaven's sake! Bush's fortune was partly based on having a court that is heavily weighted towards textualism. Rehnquist and Thomas are textualists, too. Gore should have hired a conservative to help with the appeal.