Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia delivered some advice to those Americans who still lament the court's appointment of George W. Bush as president of the United Sates following the disputed 2000 presidential election.
Said Scalia:
"Get over it."
Reported the Associated Press:
"Scalia delivered his advice Tuesday at Iona College in New York.
"Scalia, answering questions after a speech, also said that critics of the 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore need to move on six years after the electoral drama of December 2000, when it seemed the whole nation hung by a chad awaiting the outcome of the presidential election.
" 'It's water over the deck - get over it'," he said to laughter from the audience.
The AP added:
"In a decision made public on the evening of Dec. 12, 2000, the court said the recount violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because Florida counties were allowed to set their own standard for determining whether to count a vote.
" 'Counting somebody else's dimpled chad and not counting my dimpled chad is not giving equal protection of the law,' Scalia said at Iona."
Of course, the decision to stop the recount denied "equal protection of the law" to those Floridians whose votes were never considered.
Sandra Day O'Connor, who sided with Scalia and three other judges, said halting the recount didn't matter because studies showed by recounting in the four counties Democrat candidate Al Gore requested Bush would have won anyway. But the recount ordered by the Florida State Supreme Court that the US justices halted applied to all Florida counties, and the very studies O'Connor cited said that Gore would have won the state if all counties were recounted and the nation would have been spared the horrible Bush regime that ex-Washington Post Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says has done "Far Greater Damage" than did Nixon.
In an interview with washingtonpost.com, Bernstein said:
"In terms of small-bore (but dangerous) characters like Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy with their schemes, I doubt that any presidency approaches the criminality of the Nixon White House. But the Watergate conspiracy--to undermine the constitution and use illegal methods to hurt Nixon's political opponents and even undermine the electoral system--was supervised by those at the very top.
"In the current administration we have seen from the President down -- especially Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Gonzales, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld -- a willingness to ignore the great constitutional history of the United States -- to suspend, really, many of the constitutional guarantees that have made us a nation apart, with real freedoms unknown elsewhere, unrestricted by short-term political objectives of our leaders.
"Then there are the Geneva conventions: Who would have dreamed that, in our lifetime, our leaders would permit their flagrant abuse, would authorize torture, 'renditions' to foreign-torture chambers, suspension of habeus corpus, illegal surveillance of our own citizens....
*****************************************************
Thomas Bonsell is a former newspaper editor (in Oregon, New York and Colorado) United States Air Force cryptanalyst and National Security Agency intelligence agent. He became one of American journalism's leading constitutional experts through years of study at Georgetown University Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., and tries (without much success) to be patient with people who argue endlessly on subjects they have never studied. He is the author of "The Un-Americans: Trashing of the United States Constitution in the American Press", a critique of the mainstream media for ignorance of, or disdain for, our constitutional principles of self-government. He left newspaper work years ago, disgusted at the direction the Fourth Estate ~ under the mismanagement of ineffectual, out-of-touch, can't-do executives ~ was taking away from honest responsible journalism and the observation that there was no place in the mainstream media for a progressive, or liberal, constitutional "expert". Bonsell is an honors graduate of Woodbury College (Los Angeles, California) with a bachelor of business administration degree. He is profiled in Marquis Who's Who in America. (Self-portrait, above, was handled to make author/artist appear prettier than he actually is.)
Personal motto: Have brain; will use.
This letter to the editor might add to the excellent commentary on Scalia's statements.
January 26, 2007
Star Tribune
425 Portland Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55488
Although Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said of the Court's
halting the
recount of the Florida vote in 2000, "It's water over the deck -- Get
over it," the equivalent of a military coup is not the sort of thing
that anyone should get over. There is no difference between five
Supreme Court Justices ordering us to stop counting the vote and five
generals carrying out a coup and ordering us to stop counting the
vote. For the first time in U.S. history, an election was ordered
halted and an openly illegal government was installed.
Although the Supreme Court halted the recount on the ground of
egual protection because the different Florida counties had different
standards for counting disputed ballots --"Counting somebody else's
dimpled chad and not counting my dimpled chad is not giving equal
protection of the law," Scalia argued -- the Supreme Court had seen
no reason to intervene on this ground in any election since the
founding of the Republic, even though not only the different counties
but even the different states had different standards for conducting
elections and counting ballots. And in a misleadingly titled headline
"In partial recount, Bush wins, review finds," the November 12, 2001
STAR TRIBUNE reporting on the long promised media recount, informed
us that under four out of six possible methods of conducting the
recount, Gore won. And these four methods of recounting were the
only ones in which there were consistent methods of recounting the
disputed ballots, including the dimpled chads. And this does not
even take account of the fact that Florida outsourced the purging of
its voter rolls of convicted felons to private companies. The low
bidders who won the contract were, of course, the ones who cut
corners by only compiling lists of those who had been CHARGED with
felonies without checking whether they had been CONVICTED. Because
of this, as in the days of whites only voting during segregation,
many Black citizens were systematically disenfranchised.
And in addition to all this, yesterday's STAR TRIBUNE of January
25, 2007 reported that two election officials in Ohio's most populous
county, Cuyahoga, had been convicted of rigging the 2004 election.
Ohio, for instance, was one of the states that allegedly
changed to Bush over the post midnight hours, although the exit polls
had predicted a Kerry win. Exit polls, incidentally, are precisely
the means the United Nations uses to detect whether elections had
been stolen in places like Serbia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. The
laws of statistics do not change at the U.S. border. The
American news media cheered on the Serbian people when they took to
the streets when Milosevic tried to steal the Serbian elections. But
the Serbian people, as well as the people in all the other countries
where there were "color" revolutions, have suffered under both
Fascist and Stalinist tyrannies and know from experience how
unpleasant life can be under unelected, illegal governments. Let us
hope that the American people will not have to learn from the same
bitter experience before they realize that they have both the right
and the duty to take back their government.
The STAR TRIBUNE has allowed virtually no mention of the stolen
elections of 2000 and 2004 into your pages. You will probably not
allow this mention in either. But be warned! You and the rest
of the establishment keep on like this and the majority of Americans
will
eventually view their "elections" in the same way the citizens of the
former Soviet Union viewed theirs.
Robert Halfhill
http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: aolaccessibility@aol.com, or call 1-
888-212-5537.
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