Good Riddance to Decade That Began With Theft of the Presidency

Good Riddance to Decade That Began With Theft of the Presidency
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The original sin of the good-riddance decade came in December of 2000, when the United States Supreme Court intervened to stop a complete recount of the votes in Florida and then declared George Bush to be the president.

This extreme judicial activism was not merely a devastating assault on American democracy. It set in motion the Bush presidency, and with it the pathologies that the Bush-Cheney administration imposed on the country in the form of unnecessary wars, failed economic policies, assaults on civil liberties and crudely divisive and hyper-partisan governance.

Bush, Dick Cheney and aides are surely to blame for much of what ailed America during the 2000s, and for what will ail America for decades to come.

But it was the U.S. Supreme Court's unprecedented meddling in the presidential election process – an intervention that would have horrified the founders of a republic that was supposed to enjoy a separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers – made the Bush-Cheney interregnum possible.

Bush, it must be remembered, did not win the popular vote nationally.

In fact, the American electorate favored Democrat Al Gore over Republican Bush by more than 540,000 votes.

Of course, because the United States has a convoluted electoral system that does not award the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes, the contest came down to a fight between the Bush and Gore camps for Florida's decisive 25 Electoral College votes.

Florida ran a confusing and disorderly election on November 7, 2000, and then conducted a ridiculous review of the close result that followed no standards except those imposed by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Bush campaign co-chair.

When the Florida Supreme Court finally ordered a full and consistent recount of all 6.1 million ballots cast by the state's voters, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the process and then declared Bush the winner of Florida's electoral votes and the presidency.

The problem with this unprecedented move by a conflicted high court was that more Floridians went to the polls with the intention of electing Gore than Bush.

This is not some radical notion, not some conspiracy theory.

It is the reality that was evident to scholars of voting behavior from the start.

As University of California at Irvine political scientist Anthony Salvanto, who conducted some of the first and most exhaustive examinations of contested ballots, noted: "There's a pretty clear pattern from these ballots. Most of these people went to the polls to vote for Al Gore."

Salvanto was not an outlier.

Even the media consortium that tried -- after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ensuing spike in presidential approval ratings -- to suggest a scenario under which Bush might have won produced more scenarios under which Gore would have won.

Media outlets that looked beyond the partisan spin to the reality of what the ballots revealed acknowledges as much.

As The Associated Press noted, "Under any standard that tabulated all disputed ballots statewide, however, Gore erased Bush's advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes."...