foreign commentary - times -"legal coup"
November 26 2000
UNITED STATES
Gore plots next step in 'legal
coup'
Bush clings to victory claim Florida's poll gap narrows |
It's the
doomsday scenario: a 97-year-old standby president |
Countdown to crisis
IT IS clearer now than ever before that what we have been
witnessing in America these past two weeks is something only
a smidgen less than an attempted legal coup.
I say "legal" coup because the law can sometimes be
selectively used to circumvent the law. And I say "coup"
because what has been going on is an attempt to snatch
victory from the twice-declared winner in a manner that violates
almost every principle of common sense, constitutional law and
due process.
Moreover, this was clearly a premeditated, conscious decision
by Al Gore's campaign. Gore didn't blunder into this crisis. He
planned for it, prepared for it and has been micro-managing
every aspect of it from the beginning.
The first inklings came in the early hours of election night,
November 8, when William Daley, the Gore campaign manager,
declared to the throngs in Nashville that: "This campaign goes
on!"
Can you imagine a party leader in Britain, after a cliffhanger of a
vote and a pending recount, saying that the "campaign" goes
on? Campaigns are what happen before polling day. What
happens afterwards is mere counting. And that counting should
be done in as calm, as dispassionate and as sober an
atmosphere as possible. When Daley injected that element of
pure politics into the night, we should have known what was up.
Even as he spoke, teams of Democratic lawyers, experts and
spinners were being dispatched to Florida. The war was on.
As Daley was commandeering the troops, the Gore
mouthpieces were already spinning on television. I was
watching Newsweek's Jonathan Alter with increasing disbelief
at 4.30am. "I'm not talking about changing the rules or having
the popular vote somehow supercede the electoral," Alter
presciently opined. "If you look at the history of close recounts
in congressional races, they're always disputed. You go
precinct by precinct and then people say this recount wasn't
fair, we have to do it again.
"And the result after weeks would be a lot of pressure to say
instead of trying to sort out who really won Florida, let's end
this thing. You get a series of irregularities all over the state of
Florida, pretty soon nobody can figure out who really won.
What happens then?"
So the strategy was clear. The Gore team would throw every
legal challenge they could at every recount they could find.
They would routinely invoke the phrase "will of the people" at
every convenient moment to keep reminding people that Gore
had won the popular vote nationally. And they would simply
assert something nobody properly knew - that if "the will of the
people" were followed, Gore would be shown to have won
Florida.
The longer it went on, they surmised, the better chance they
would have of saying, "This is such a mess, let's just give the
White House to the man with the most popular votes." And
they bet that the Republicans would be so blind-sided, they
wouldn't know what had hit them before it was too late.
There were obstacles to stealing an election, of course. The
first problem for the Gore side was that Florida law mandated a
certified result within a week of the election. If that happened,
George W Bush would be declared the winner and Gore would
look like a sore loser.
So the Gore team went to the Florida Supreme Court
demanding that it simply rescind Florida's law. They knew the
court would be on their side - it's one of the most biased, liberal
courts in the country.
Only two months ago, the court simply struck down a ballot
initiative legalising lethal injection as a death penalty
procedure, because the court thought it was "cruel and unusual
punishment". Forget the fact that voters had supported the
measure by 73% to 27%.
Similarly, the court has barred 19 valid initiatives from even
going before the voters in recent years - because the court, not
the voters, regarded them as misleading. To get around this,
Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative action activist, proposed
four different wordings for an initiative he tried to get before the
voters.
The Florida court simply struck all the wordings down as
"confusing". It is in favour of affirmative action and it believes its
role is to stop voters from having a free vote on the matter. End
of discussion. This is what judicial tyranny is.
So the Goreites were not surprised when the court peremptorily
stopped the legal certification of the result. The court cited
confusing language in the law, which both says that Florida's
secretary of state must certify results a week after the election
and also that she may make exceptions for late counties.
Under the law, these questions are routinely settled by the
secretary of state herself, who has "discretion" to resolve the
matter. She can be overruled by the court only if her actions
are "clearly erroneous". Debatable they were - but "clearly
erroneous"? Not a chance, as a lower court judge rightly ruled.
Still, the Florida court was not one to let legal precedent guide
its actions. It did the Gore team's bidding, overruling the lower
court, legalising recounts with no firm rules for what constitutes
a vote, and then setting an arbitrary date to complete them:
today. Score one for the legal coup.
So with this court behind them, Gore's aides hired every
hot-shot lawyer they could find and fought on. They first said
that the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot" was illegal - and sowed
confusion for several days. Haven't heard of that blessed
butterfly lately? It was ruled clearly legal by a judge last week,
who barred any re-vote. Never mind. It was worth a try.
Then Gore tried the racial angle, declaring that black voters had
been intimidated from voting by police, election workers and
even dogs. Forget the fact that black turnout was at record
levels and that, as yet, no such intimidation has been proved. It
was enough to sow more confusion while Gore's team tried to
get hand recounts in four carefully selected counties where he
had big victories.
In one of those counties, Broward, the Democratic-run
canvassing board looked at the number of disputed ballots and
concluded that a hand count was unnecessary. Lo and behold,
a couple of days later, one of those Democrats was leaned on
and unaccountably changed his mind.
When it appeared in Palm Beach County that the hand-counts
weren't turning up enough votes for Gore, the Democratic-run
canvassing board decided to change its rules on what
constitutes a vote and allowed a mere indentation near a
candidate's name to be valid - the now famous "dimpled chad".
To defend the preposterous notion that such an indentation is a
valid vote, the Gore lawyers cited a case in Illinois where such
votes had been allowed in a recount.
Surprise, surprise, two days later the Chicago Tribune ran a
story showing that that was simply untrue. Those dimpled
ballots had never been ruled valid in such a case. The next day
The Washington Post showed that such ballots had almost
never been included as valid votes in any election in the country
- with the exception of a case in Massachusetts, where the
ballots had been spoilt by rain.
Nevertheless, the Gore team fought on. In Dade County, when
the deadline was approaching and Gore votes weren't emerging
quickly enough, the board decided to meet in a small room,
exclude any Republican observers and the press, and count
only those ballots that were disputed.
When this further change of the rules prompted a near-riot from
vote-counters, the county decided to call off the entire recount.
Undeterred, the Gore team sued the board to force a recount.
That suit mercifully failed.
You could add to this litany of thuggishness the fanatical Gore
effort to disqualify nearly 4,000 absentee ballots from military
personnel for often piddling technical reasons.
The assumption is that most of these votes are for Bush. In
Democratic-run counties, therefore, about 70% of these ballots
were thrown out as invalid. Compare that with the 4% spoilt
ballot rate in Palm Beach, and you can begin to see the
ambition of the Democrats.
As I write, it's still not clear whether Gore will be able to
scrounge enough votes to eke out a victory over Bush today.
But Gore has already said that if the final tally this evening
doesn't give him total victory, he will fight on and force further
recounts.
This is a man who will do anything to win: trash the
constitution, get his lawyers to peddle falsehoods in court,
change counting rules in mid-stream, gerry-rig recounts to
favour him, intimidate anyone who stands in his way. In a sign
of how serious this has become, the Supreme Court has now
decided to step in. It is almost unheard of for the United States
Supreme Court to intervene in an electoral process that is
rightly usually left to the state running the election.
It is a sign, perhaps, that the justices in Washington have been
able to see the travesty of justice and due process that the
Gore team has been foisting on the election.
I will tell you one thing about this endgame. It is enough to
make any fair-minded person realise that Gore is a danger to
the country and to the constitution. He's beginning to make
Richard Nixon look magnanimous and Bill Clinton look honest.
I once believed he was a good man, of serious purpose and
honest intent. That belief is no longer tenable.
He is a coldly ambitious man who is prepared to hold the
country hostage to this trauma indefinitely and destroy his
party's slow march back to the centre of American politics in
the process.
We should all be praying that he doesn't make it to the White
House. But the people who should be praying hardest are
those Democrats who still have faith in their party and
reverence for their country.
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