| |
|
What possible reason would there be to call out the US Supreme Court to
defend a candidate that had lost the popular vote, on all fronts. Gore had
won an edge of 21 electoral votes, by some 300,000 popular votes, and was
only 3 electoral votes shy of winning the Presidency. Gore also won the
popular vote in Florida, a fact clear to even the ultra-right Buchanan who
admitted the 3,000 votes he received above what might be expected in the
Jewish enclave of Palm Beach were not his votes, but Gore's. The
Florida vote re-count was stopped, repeatedly, by partisan loyalists of
the Bush family. Where this might have been expected in Florida,
controlled by the Bush family, what would cause the Supreme Court to break
its long standing tradition of not getting involved in
Presidential contests - a tradition that had endured throughout its
history?
The cry that every vote should count, echoed by the GOP lawyers when their
behind-the-scenes efforts to boost their candidate by illegal amendments
to absentee ballots were exposed, were put aside when the Democratic
opposition presented the same argument. This familiar court-room posture
by lawyers, whereby they contradict themselves from one day to the next
when trying to win the argument of the moment, could have been expected of
lawyers. But what would cause the Supreme Court, when stopping a legally
called re-count and effort to examine every ballot for the intent of the
voter, to cast a blind eye to one group of voters while giving
an irrational protection to another group? The only difference
appeared to be partisanship, that the judges themselves had been appointed
by Republicans, as the final vote was strictly along partisan lines.
But is there more to this picture? Did the Supreme Court not have more to
lose, in this vote, in that the public looks to it to be non-partisan and
supporting the Constitution? Where talk of disenfranchised voters and a
partisan Supreme Court will die down, the shock that the citizenry feels
at what is a betrayal of their voting rights will not diminish. Often the
larger the shock, the greater the stunned silence, so that the
long-reaching and long-lasting effect of this shock is not gauged by the
smug winning party. Nevertheless, a deep distrust of the new
administration will be the result of this action, which will only be
understood when attempts to win over the public for new initiatives seem
to fall flat. In disenfranchising the American voter, as well as the
Florida voter, the Supreme Court did more than express partisanship. They
displayed, to those looking behind the moves, a cold and firm plan of the
wealthy elite to survive during the coming changes, at the expense of
democracy and the people those in government service have sworn to serve.
Did those at the fore of the GOP campaign, and voting to suppress the voter's right from the bench of the Supreme Court, know of this ultimate plan? If not in full understanding of the circumstances which would call for such steps, they understood that too little would be available to go around, and that choices would have to be made. In this, they threw themselves in with those who were to be survivors, the elite, and deserted those they had sworn to serve. The public can expect more of the same, over the few months and years left until the coming pole shift. The US government will increasingly serve the elite, and will fail to give any explanation of their actions to the public. In this blatant service to the elite they will become increasingly irrelevant - an administration serving itself, and not a leader the public could respect or take seriously.