This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath.
The decision outraged many people for a little while, and has now been all but forgotten. But it seems so much 'progressive' energy was poured into lamenting and blogging about the Supreme Court decision that all the outrage over the electoral processes that caused the crisis dissipated and went unaddressed. Indeed, Florida had similar problems again in 2004. And Florida is not alone: Pennsylvania and Ohio, two crucial 'swing states', continue to have significant systemic flaws to this day that disproportionately affect black voters.
But the Florida political circus wasn't disturbing merely because of infrastructural flaws and weaknesses, but more importantly it was the underlying meanness and nastiness of the treatment, of denying a citizen the chance to vote because, they were being told to their astonishment, that they were felons who no longer deserved --and, in any case, no longer had -- the right to vote. No doubt some people would argue that the system was unintentionally disenfranchising and malignant, part of the general malaise of bureaucratic dysfunction, but I would not be so luxuriantly generous. When it comes right down to, controlling and Republican authorities in Florida were simply not going to allow the most important election of the 20th century to be decided by blacks. One need only see the speed with which the issue fizzled after the Supreme Court handed down their edict; in how little effort was put into making sure such voting transgressions didn't take place again; how small was the squall of outrage that a whole class of people was dis-empowered at a crucial moment in American democracy; in returning to that comfortable numbness so well described in a song by Pink Floyd. There were very few, if any, apologies for the clearly racist intentions leading to obviously successful political ends. But that's the way that it is in Florida, as the Trayvon Martin episode amply demonstrated.
Even many African-Americans have 'moved on', largely bolstered by the energy of renewed hope for better things that came with the ascension of Barack Obama, the first black president. But by any measurement, including his progressive club pass for being born black, Obama is a bust as president, who has broken almost every significant campaign promise he ever made and left African-Americans in worse shape, all things considered, than they were 50 years ago during the Freedom Summer. It's true that African-Americans are no longer routinely brutalized in the Dixiecrat South the way they were half a century ago, but they continue to be brutalized nationally on a scale that is depressing to behold, and it is tragic to see a black man preside over such decay. Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, has referred to Obama as a scourge to African-Americans, as not "the lesser of two evils but the more effective evil," the implication being that after all Obama's broken promises and betrayal there can be no hope again.
In 1995, when the Nation of Islam staged its Million-Man March on Washington, by some estimates drawing as many as 850,000 black men to the Mall outside the White House. Speaker after speaker decried the state of being black in America. They cited record imprisonment rates, unrelenting unemployment, sub-standard educations, no real hope for large scale upward mobility, poor health care. And this low reached its high in 2000 when the Republicans stole the presidential election by taking away the votes of thousands of black Floridians. It was an election that has turned into a key turning point in American (and, consequently, global) history, leading as it did to the lapses that helped produce pre-text tragedy of 9/11 and its security lock-down aftermath. It is no longer safe for the Nation of Islam to denounce American domestic policy. And Obama has turned into a smiling beast of posture, dissemblance, propaganda, and outright lies, turning his back on the black community and virtually handing the keys of the republic over to elite private interests who don't give a damn about plights or pleas or suffering.
In short, the irony is about 50 years later, we are celebrating (in that we are not protesting) a summer of surveillance and opacity instead of freedom and inclusion, and a black president is in charge as the ship of state sinks into the shark-infested waters of the post-democratic marketplace. The world is busy fighting an abstract noun--terrorism that it cannot win. And just as other nations once turned to the US to find guidance for the good, they are doing so today to implement the evil. In Europe austerity measures abound throughout the Union; in Turkey, the government works with the CIA to overthrow and possess Syria (and the former Ottoman imperial region); in Australia, the conservative Abbott government slashes away at the social safety net, while, at the same time, promising to find money to build up its military in support of Obama's coming pivot toward confrontation with China.
In this milieu, voting rights seem quaint; democracy a dream that is almost too cruel to have ever had.
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