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How the Supreme Court Stole The Election
(BuzzFlash, December 15, 2004)
In case you missed it, an exhaustive 23,422-word Vanity Fair article, published just prior to the election (October), spilled the beans that at least four of the five Supreme Court justices who stole the election from Al Gore did it with willing forethought. . . . In short, the story, the first one to reveal the inside machinations of the infamous decision of 2000, confirmed that this wasn't a judicial decision that decided the election 4 years ago; it was a premeditated theft of democracy from the American voters. . . . The partisan choice of five justices -- led by the judicial right-wing molotov-cocktail throwing Nino Scalia -- outweighed the selection of the American people. . . . Why is this important now? Because it confirms that the Bush Cartel will do and did everything to win -- and it doesn't take a leap of imagination or common sense to speculate that with four years in office, they were able to heist the election this time without a nod and a wink to Nino and his right wing ship of judicially radical pirates. . . . What we forget in our focus on Ohio is that the Republicans, through dirty tricks, voter suppression and intimidation, faulty felons' lists, and the deep-sixing of tens of thousands of Kerry votes -- among other anti-democracy tactics -- probably had the election heisted before the polls even opened. They privatized the counting of votes of Americans and turned it over to companies deeply ensconced in the Republican camp and Republican politics, with checkered histories and Republican ownership. They intentionally mis-registered college students, threw away the registration forms of perhaps tens of thousands of Democrats, and lost more than 55,000 absentee ballots in Jewish/Democratic leaning Broward County, FL, alone. And this list is just for starters. . . . < b> The Bush rogue regime was born a bastard child by a fixed Supreme Court vote and now controls the process by which any investigation of voting irregularities would be pursued. . . . Now out in the working world, the two clerks, along with most of their colleagues who worked for the four liberal justices and the occasional conservative justice, remain angered, haunted, shaken, and disillusioned by what they saw. They'd learned in their elite law schools that the law was just and that judges resolved legal disputes by nonpartisan analysis of neutral principles. But Bush v. Gore, as seen from the inside, convinced them they'd been sold a bill of goods. . . . Gore had been narrowing Bush's lead, and his campaign expected that by Monday he would pull ahead. But Scalia was convinced that all the manual recounts were illegitimate. He told his colleagues such recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. It was essential, he said, to shut down the process immediately. The clerks were amazed at how baldly Scalia was pushing what they considered his own partisan agenda. . . . In the meantime, the conservative justices began sending around memos to their colleagues, each of them offering a different rationale for ruling in Bush's favor; to the liberal clerks, it was apparent that the conservatives had already decided the case and were merely auditioning arguments. So eager was the majority to stop the recount, one clerk recalls, that Stevens had to plead for more time to complete his dissent. . . . The brother of a Ginsburg clerk, who covered legal affairs for The Wall Street Journal, had learned that the paper would soon report how, at a party on Election Night, O'Connor was overheard expressing her dismay over Gore's apparent victory. Once that information became public, the liberal clerks felt, O'Connor would have to step aside. When, on the night before the Court convened, she sent out a sealed memo to each of her colleagues, those clerks hoped this had actually come to pass. In fact, she was merely stating that she, too, felt the Florida Supreme Court had improperly usurped the state legislature's power. . . . The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush campaign turned to the United States Supreme Court. Claiming that the situation in Florida had degenerated into a "circus," it asked the high court to stop everything, and cited two highly technical federal issues for it to consider. The first, based on an obscure law from 1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after the date of that election. The second, a jurisdictional issue, was that by stepping into the case the Florida Supreme Court had usurped the Florida legislature's exclusive powers to set the procedures for selecting electors, as provided for by Article II of the United States Constitution. . . . Despite their loyalty to their justices-a striking, filial-like phenomenon among most clerks-several concede that the dissenters in Bush v. Gore were simply outmaneuvered. Never did the four of them have the votes to prevail. But first by endorsing a decision suggesting that the Florida Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds, then by appearing to buttress the majority's equal-protection claims, the dissenters had aided and abetted the enemy. "They gave just enough cover to the five justices and their defenders in the press and academia so that it was impossible to rile up the American people about these five conservative ideologues stealing the election," one clerk complains. . . . So here was a damning indictment that revealed, from inside participants, that a right wing judicial coup had stolen a Presidential election -- and that Nino Scalia had played the role of a ward hack who would stop at nothing to install his candidate, whatever the will of the voters. . . . How did the mainstream press respond? With virtually deafening silence and some ridicule. . . . What does all this mean? . . . That most Americans, except for people like our beloved BuzzFlash readers, "got over" the theft of the 2000 election and the felony committed against democracy, only to give the criminals four years to create the ability to systemically define and steal the election. There was no one way that the Bush Barbary Pirates took the Presidency this November. It was through a multi-pronged strategy, of which the snagging of Ken Blackwell as Ohio Katherine's Harris was a key element, but hardly the only dirty trick. We don't know who Blackwell's Mac Stipanovich was, but we do know that this heist of the American election was four years in the making. . . . A bastard presidency couldn't win a free and transparent election. It systemically stole this one through fear, character assassination, and a wide range of dirty tricks before and at the polls, including the likely manipulation of electronic voting machines in key states. . . . The truth is that the valiant band of Democratic Congressional Representatives led by Congressman Conyers -- as well as the Green and Libertarian Parties -- are carrying on the Spirit of '76 in pursuing the voting irregularities in Ohio. . . . But the theft of the 2004 election goes much deeper than Ohio, although it was the linchpin electoral state. It was widespread, systemic, and coordinated -- throughout the nation. . . . But with a one-party government, who will investigate the perpetrators of the crime against democracy redux, when it is the perpetrators who hijacked our system of government and who control the committees and departments that could investigate, well, themselves? . . . The news in America is now on six hour cycles. Each day, we forget the morning's news by the afternoon. . . . It is no wonder that so many have forgotten that four years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States put the nails in the coffin of democracy. It occurred in the darkness of a winter Washington night on Tuesday, December 12th, with an unprecedented 10 PM decision release that elected George W. Bush president by a vote of 5-4.

posted by LoZo 12:41 PM