2. The Supreme Court was correct in terms of Bush v Gore that there was an Equal Protection issue. There does need to be state-wide uniformity in counting of votes and standards to protect and promote right to vote. However, unlike what the Court did I think Stevens got it correct in his dissent in saying that the Court should have then remanded to allow for recounting under new standards that apply statewide. This is what I think the better decision should have been legally and best for ensuring the right to vote.
"So Supreme Court Justices are not political theorists, what do you expect? . . . They are lawyers and judges, not philosopher kings and queens . . . election law is incoherent and rudderless" for lack of theory as a base. They rule "on a case-to-case basis . . . and perhaps the reasons why there are confused or so rudderless is their approach to the topic."
Values are implicit within election law disputes . . . often clashing. That's a problem that seems beyond solution given the huge ideological schism afflicting society since . . . the Powell Manifesto? The Reagan administration? The consequences of Bush v Gore? The shutting down of the government twice in the preceding twenty years with a threat to do this again in the near future over Planned Parenthood activities?
Specific Supreme Court decisions and discussions about them weave through the narrative as examples in each chapter: (1) Theory: The Missing Piece in Election Law . . . ; (2) Democratic Theory and American Politics; (3) Voting Rights; (4) Minority Rights and the Failure of Direct Democracy; (5) Representation and Reapportionment; (6), Political Parties, and (7) Money, Politics, and Campaign Financing.
The Introduction and Conclusion concentrate on democratic theory. The Acknowledgments section begins not with thank-you's but a quote from Alfred North Whitehead that all of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. I'd go so far as to say that all of Western civilization is--the absurdist Samuel Beckett thought that these roots were drying up after such long wear and tear, but Schultz writes of their revival and applicability to new areas--a new field.
American history in general appears in the book in the right places to illuminate perspectives through precedents. Among the crucial markers in the development of democracy in this country was the creation of political parties just after the Constitution was completed, so that there is not one word in the document about them. Throughout the book aspects of the First and Fourteenth Amendments are invoked again and again as attempted explanations or justifications of issues and questions.
Think of the definition of Federalism versus the Democratic-Republicans in the so- controversial battle between Jefferson and Burr in 1800. How the founders feared factionalism but how important political parties are as a basis for democracy, which is said to control them, of which dissent is the lifeblood.
It was Washington who, in his farewell speech warned of factionalism, which flowered into political parties.
Given the climate before the American Revolution, with its government expressed by the Articles of Confederation, fear of factionalism was justifiable. Such warnings would certainly be justifiable too, today. The Tea Party is a faction. Later Schultz adds that today's melee of political confrontations would horrify the founders.
After Election 1800, the author writes that the next milestone in the history of democracy's evolution was Jacksonian democracy as more and more people had acquired the right to vote and elitism had given way to the root meaning of what purports to be our government: "rule by the people." The age of Progressivism followed as another milestone, ushering in "the politics-administration dichotomy, neutral competence, and initiative, referendum, and recall, either a re-invention of democracy" or an effort to stem corruption caused by special interests (so what else is new?). There was FDR's brief Camelot of governing of, by, and for the People one hundred years after Lincoln theorized it and gave it legs long enough to spawn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, undone soon after by the Jim Crow era. And yet there are many who say that what really cured the economic woes of the great depression was World War II. With the ascent of FDR, by the way, the Democratic Party became the party of the people while the focus of the GOP was "pro-business" and "anti-government." But left-wing and right-wing extremism as we know them today were not evident.
Adding its concepts to Madisonian democracy, with its emphasis on checks and balances and the public good, with its federalism and fear of factions, with its fear of the tyranny of the majority and insistence on the separation of powers, along came pluralism in the mid-twentieth century, with its "Tocquevillian" emphasis on the importance of voluntary groups, the importance of "group competition and the inevitable bargaining it entails, to solve the problem of how to sustain a liberal democracy"--through Tocqueville's balance between discord and consensus? One of his brilliant insights (from his analysis Democracy in America (1835, 1840), written as a result of his visit to the United States in the 1831, is that voluntary association, not the individual, is the savior of democracy--political parties? Further, democracy would not be possible without group associations--"buffers between the government and the people . . . to protect individual rights." [the last quote is another's]. Through the eyes of a foreigner come astounding insights crucial to democratic thinking.
But acknowledgment of the importance of groups in running the country inevitably demands a role for corporations and labor unions. At the same time, a crucial point is that politics is these days wedded to economics most destructively. Big money is running the system in alliance with both parties [Republicans more than Democrats]. Politics must remain separate from economics, just as religion is ideally divorced from politics: "To assert this is not to argue that the political system is divorced from the economy or from a sociology, but instead to contend that the values that determine how economic transactions are made are different from those which should affect the political process." "'The Framers would have been appalled by the impact of modern fundraising practices on the ability of elected officials to perform their public responsibilities.'"
Back to the marriage between the economy and the government, a precedent is centuries old: when George Washington first ran for political office, he gave out too much free rum for the taste of many, inaugurating a long tradition of bribery and with that the quid-pro-quo system that makes sense to some extent but leads to huge corruption and the warped logic behind Don Siegelman's long-term unjustifiable imprisonment.
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