Reprinted from The Nation
The British press has taken to referring to the passing decade as "the
Noughties" has made quite a big deal of trying to identify the political,
economic and cultural trends of period from 2000 to 2009.
It is an amusing pastime that has some value, but only if we're focused on
identifying the root cause of what made the Noughties such a miserable decade
for the republic.
If we are serious about the task, there is not much mystery.
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.
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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."
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John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
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