The Discerning Texan

God, I love Scalia. I wish he would write a book like Thomas did (talk about an outstanding book...). h/t to Glenn the Law Professor for pointing us to this post:

"It was Al Gore who made it a judicial question…. We didn’t go looking for trouble. It was he who said, 'I want this to be decided by the courts.'"

"What are we supposed to say — 'Not important enough?'



It's nice to get a snappy video clip of Scalia saying this. I think he's right. I've thought that from the day the case came out. And I voted for Al Gore and had been watching the Florida antics with the punchcards and the chads and hoping he'd luck into a win. I've also written about the case at length and taught the case many times in law school.

ADDED: Here's the main scholarly article I wrote about the Gore-Bush litigation.

And (just in case anyone has forgotten), the court battles were not the only unseemly behavior that went on vis-a-vis Florida that year:

• TV Network disenfranchisement of heavily Republican Florida counties: when the networks called Florida for Gore, the polls were still open in Western Florida's heavily Republican Counties. John Lott of the American Enterprise Institute did a scientific study of the impact of these false "early calls" to voters in Western Florida. His Conclusion: "Something unusual happened to Republican voting rates in Florida’s western Panhandle in the 2000 general election. To put these results in perspective, each one percent drop in Republican turnout relative to the non-Republicans in the western Panhandle represents about 2 500 votes—a drop of about 7 votes per precinct. The drop of at least 15% implied by the pooled cross-sectional
  time-series data suggests that there were 37 500 fewer votes for Bush, 105 fewer votes per precinct. If anything, these results seem too large particularly if the effect of the media coverage was only to discourage Republican voters, even though voters vote at disproportionately high rates during the last hour that polls are open. But clearly something unusual occurred in the 2000 Presidential election. Even the purely cross-sectional estimates imply that Bush received as many as 7 500 to 10 000 fewer votes than he would normally have expected later in the day.

• Military vote disenfranchisement: the Gore campaign made active efforts to stop the counting of military votes, and political processes were in place beginning with the Clinton Administration to disenfranchise the military. The overall Democrat attempt to rob the power of the vote from our military men and women is nothing short of scandalous. It seemingly got lost in the "count every chad" news cycle (go figure), but we should not allow it to remain forgotten.
  

• African-American (Republican) vote disenfranchisement after the fact. In 2006 a study of the details of the 2000 Florida vote unearthed a stunning fact. Read the story as reported then by James Glassman and John Lott: (Lott also did a research study on this topic, which can be found here):
  

  Last week, detailed statistics were released on voting in Florida during the presidential election. The data for the first time include all of the state`s precincts, with not just information on race but on party affiliation.
  At first glance, the numbers confirm the disturbing claims, repeated often this year, that African American ballots were "spoiled"--that is, not counted because they showed either no vote for president or multiple votes--at higher rates than the ballots of other groups.
  
  The Rev. Jesse Jackson was not alone in charging "a clear pattern of suppressing the votes of African Americans." Much less detailed data earlier this year caused the chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to call for a criminal investigation.
  
  The newspaper consortium that has been recounting the Florida votes will release a report today that is expected to highlight the racial disparity in the spoiled ballots, giving a boost to reform bills that are now moving swiftly through Congress to try to remedy the apparent problem.
  
  But if spoiled ballots do indicate disenfranchisement, then the new data show that, by a dramatic margin, the group most victimized in the Florida voting was African American Republicans.
  
  We discovered this stunning twist in an extensive analysis of the new data.
  
  The new findings show that African American Republicans who voted in Florida were in excess of 50 times more likely than the average African American to have had a ballot declared invalid because it was spoiled.
  
  These results take into account a wide range of factors that influence spoiled-ballot rates, including education, gender, income, age, number of absentee votes, voting-machine type, ballot type and whether votes were counted at the precinct or centrally.
  
  In other words, it is the isolated fact of being a Republican that makes an African American vastly more likely to have his or her ballot declared invalid.

Yet, after all this, they still lost. And don't give me that populist garbage about the Electoral College. It will take a Constitutional Amendment to change that one: Good luck on getting enough flyover states to support that one...

Never forget that it was Al Gore whose ego was so inflated that he almost tore the country apart by fighting a legitimate electoral result--he has never led Florida, not after all the counts, recounts, and even post-election media counts. He never led.

If you think about it, much of the acrimony and scorched earth politics we are seeing today may be a direct result of Gore's "refuse to lose" tour of Florida in 2000; that event more than any I can think of in recent memory has caused a split in the American political landscape and psyche that still has not healed.

Thanks, Al. What kind of awards do they give out in Stockholm for polarizing and dividing a nation?