10-20-2004, 12:16 AM
|
#30 (permalink)
|
|
Banned
|
Read the entire October, 2004 Vanity Fair Article concerning the details of
the unprecedented disclosure of former supreme court law clerks who witnessed
the deliberations that resulted in the 5 to 4 December, 2000 Gore v. Bush
ruling: <a href="http://www.makethemaccountable.com/articles/The_Path_To_Florida.htm">The Path to Florida</a>
Quote:
.......The Court’s opinions were issued at roughly 10 o’clock that night. The only one that mattered, the short majority opinion, was unsigned, but it bore Kennedy’s distinctive stamp. There was the usual ringing rhetoric, like the “equal dignity owed to each voter,” even though, as a practical matter, the ruling meant that the ballots of 60,000 of them would not even be examined. The varying standards of the recount, Kennedy wrote, did not satisfy even the rudimentary requirements of equal protection. Although six more days would pass before the electors met in their states, he insisted there was too little time for the Florida courts to fix things.
There were two more extraordinary passages: first, that the ruling applied to Bush and Bush alone, lest anyone think the Court was expanding the reach of the equal-protection clause; and, second, that the Court had taken the case only very reluctantly and out of necessity. “That infuriated us,” one liberal clerk recalls. “It was typical Kennedy bullshit, aggrandizing the power of the Court while ostensibly wringing his hands about it.”
Rehnquist, along with Scalia and Thomas, joined in the decision, but Scalia, for one, was unimpressed. Whether or not one agrees with him, Scalia is a rigorous thinker; while the claim that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its bounds had some superficial heft to it, the opinion on equal-protection was mediocre and flaccid. “Like we used to say in Brooklyn,” he is said to have told a colleague, “it’s a piece of shit.” (Scalia denies disparaging the majority opinion; the other justices would not comment for this article.)
Sharing little but a common sense of exhaustion and Thai takeout, the clerks came together briefly to watch the news. As reporters fumbled with the opinions—the final line of Kennedy’s opinion, sending the case back to Florida even though there was really nothing more the Florida court could do, confused many of them—the clerks shouted imprecations at the screen. The liberal ones slumped in their chairs; some left the room, overcome by their own irrelevance. “We had a desire to get out already and see if journalists and politicians could stop what we couldn’t stop,” says one. They contemplated a variety of options—holding a press conference, perhaps, or leaking incriminating documents. There was just one problem: there were none. “If there’d been a memo saying, ‘I know this is total garbage but I want Bush to be president,’ I think it would have found its way into the public domain,” one clerk recalls........
|
Quote:
But I think this decision will haunt the reputations of the justices in the majority forever........
I don’t think it’s in doubt. This will be in the first couple of paragraphs in all of their obituaries.<a href="http://makethemaccountable.com/caro/Interview_Toobin_Jeffrey_011108_Transcript.htm">Interview_Toobin_Jeffrey_011108_Transcript.htm</a>
|
|
|
|