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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (122060)	1/14/2001 8:21:26 PM
From: Mr. Palau	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

>>I doubt Partytime that you can digest the meaning of what I've said above and figure out why you don't know how I think.<< I would challenge anyone on this board to figure out how you think.

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (122060)	1/14/2001 9:08:58 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Well, you may call Clinton the names that you do...and, if you think about it, Bush's past drunkard behavior probably spawned something akin to your Clinton criticism. Bush, having his best buddy's wife doing in his laundry, I think, is a bit telling as to where Bush's head was at in his past. Think his consciousness was better in his drunkard states? Is Bush different today? Very likely. Is Clinton? Also, very likely. So go where you want with those criticisms. In my view, all you're doing by using terms like that is echoing Murdoch-like headlinism. I use the term "thief" 'cause Bush's camp stole the election. And here's some of how they managed to pull it off: DECISION 2000 Supreme Court Ruling: Right or Wrong? David G. Savage ; Henry Weinstein 12/21/2000 Los Angeles Times Home Edition Page A-25 Copyright 2000 / The Times Mirror Company In the week since the Supreme Court handed down its decision on the presidential race, the ruling has attracted harsh criticism from many legal scholars and passionate defenses from others. Critics say the five justices in the majority decided what result they wanted to reach--an end to ballot recounts--and then cobbled together a weak rationale to get there. The critics also say the court departed from its usual conservative principles by resolving the type of "political question" that the justices have shunned in other cases and by holding that Florida's inconsistent standards for judging ballots violated the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws." Defenders of the ruling say the court did the nation a service by resolving a seemingly intractable dispute. The justices had no choice but to overturn a Florida Supreme Court decision that was allowing ballot recounts to go forward with no guarantees of fairness or accuracy, defenders say. What follows are excerpts from the majority and dissenting justices' opinions stating the opposing sides of the case along with explanatory material by The Times and commentaries by leading scholars * Question 5 Did recounting the ballots under the standard used by the Florida Supreme Court violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws"? JUSTICES' OPINIONS The ruling: The recount mechanisms implemented in response to the decisions of the Florida Supreme Court do not satisfy the minimum requirement for non-arbitrary treatment of voters necessary to secure the fundamental right. Florida's basic command for the count of legally cast votes is to consider the "intent of the voter." This is unobjectionable as an abstract proposition and a starting principle. The problem inheres in the absence of specific standards. * Dissent [Breyer]: [T]he ballots of voters in counties that use punch-card systems are more likely to be disqualified than those in counties using optical-scanning systems. ... Thus, in a system that allows counties to use different types of voting systems, voters already arrive at the polls with an unequal chance that their votes will be counted. I do not see how the fact that this results from counties' selection of different voting machines rather than a court order makes the outcome any more fair. Nor do I understand why the Florida Supreme Court's recount order, which helps to redress this inequity, must be entirely prohibited based on a deficiency that could easily be remedied. * WHAT'S AT ISSUE The fact that this turned out to be the key question in the case was a surprise in itself. In constitutional law, "equal protection of the laws" has a special meaning. Because all laws make distinctions, people can always claim they were subjected to different treatment. Motor vehicle laws, for example, say a person who is 16 years old can obtain a driver's license, but a 15-year-old cannot. The two people are not treated equally, but that does not violate the Constitution because the government has a rational basis for treating them differently. The high court has used the equal protection clause to strike down laws that discriminate based on race, gender or national origin. In the 1960s, the court also used the equal protection clause to reject laws that infringed on the right to vote, such as the poll tax that discriminated against poor people. But the court in recent years has almost always ruled against equal protection claims unless a person can prove that he or she was discriminated against intentionally. In this case, counties in Florida were using different rules to determine whether indentations on a ballot reflected an actual intent to vote. While no one alleged intentional discrimination, the result of the process was that people's ballots would count differently depending on where they lived. The issue was whether that unintentional variation violated the equal protection guarantee. * Expert analysis Yes Bradford Berenson, is an attorney at Sidley & Austin in Washington, D.C. "It seems to me there is an equal protection problem of a fairly serious kind if you are applying different standards to votes in different parts of the state. ... It can't possibly be that the 'clear intent' of the voters means one thing in Palm Beach and something else in Broward County. Seven justices agreed on that basic proposition, including a Clinton-Gore appointee, which shows the majority was not off on some adventurous journey. It's true there was a wide variety of defects exposed in this election, including the disparities caused by the voting machines. But there was no way to unscramble that egg, except by throwing out the entire election. I think the justices concluded there was no fair and constitutional way to conduct a statewide recount at this late date. So, if you can't fix the problem and make it perfect, they decided that ultimately the fairest way was to take the guy who received the most votes in the machine count." * No David D. Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. "Every state of the union uses different procedures in elections and counts vote with different machines. Sometimes it differs by county and by precinct. In the end, this means ballots are treated differently, and they always have been. Of course, there is no intent to treat people differently, but it is the necessary result of a messy voting process. Until now, no court, let alone the Supreme Court, had held these differences raised any constitutional concern, much less violated the equal protection clause . This was entirely unprecedented. The Legislature here used a system with different machines to get a statewide result, and no one thought that raised an equal protection problem. Yet, when a state court steps in to try to make sure all the votes are counted, they said it does make for an equal protection violation. It seems to me that shows this was a legal standard that was made up to decide this case, and this case only."