The Discerning Texan

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, April 25, 2008

Attempted Grand Theft: "It was Al Gore who made it a Judicial Question...."

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:
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?
DiscerningTexan, 4/25/2008 03:33:00 PM |