11/20/00 2:50 p.m.
Supreme Mischief
Florida’s high court abuses its discretion.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

ne of the silver linings of the fiasco in Florida is that it is, in its small way, contributing to the demystification of the courts. Every time the press reports on the partisan make-up of the latest court to rule, the notion that our judges are above politics suffers another blow. (There is, of course, a conservative case for inculcating a reverence, even a logically unwarranted reverence, for imperfect but useful institutions. There is no good case for inculcating reverence toward corrupt ones.)

The Florida Supreme Court, that murderers' row of liberal activists, is certainly in need of demystification. Its decision on Friday, delaying Katherine Harris from certifying the election results, would have been shocking if its political proclivities were not known. Nobody had asked for an injunction from the Court, which acted "on its own motion." Not even David Boies, one of Al Gore's lawyers, thought there were grounds for such an injunction. To issue it, the court had to overrule decision-makers in all three branches of government: the legislature that established a seven-day deadline for certification, the administration that established and applied criteria for determining whether that deadline could be relaxed for some counties, and the circuit court that had given a go-ahead (arguably two go-aheads) for the certification. (If Harris's insistence on the statutory deadline was really an "abuse of discretion," so was Judge Terry Lewis's tolerance for that insistence.)

Gore's lead lawyer in Florida, Dexter Douglass, was counsel to former Governor Lawton Chiles, who appointed five of the seven justices on the state supreme court. Given that fact, and the ruling on Friday, a final decision that goes for Gore will be greeted with extreme, and deserved, skepticism.

Laying It on with a Trowel
Wondering about the relevance of all those nasty remarks about Katherine Harris's make-up to the events in Florida? The Washington Post's Style section uncovered the connection on Saturday, with an essay by Robin Givhan. "At this moment that so desperately needs diplomacy, understatement and calm," Givhan meowed, "one wonders how this Republican woman, who can't even use restraint when she's wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship.

"Besides, she looks bad — not by the hand of God but by her own. She took fashion — which speaks in riddles, hyperbole and half-truths — at its word, imbibing all of those references to the '70s and '80s, taking styling cues from Versace ads in which models are made up as if by a mortician's assistant, believing the magazines when they said that blue eye shadow was back. She failed to think for herself. Why should anyone trust her?" It's a question we often ask about the Washington Post — which, come to think of it, isn't looking very pretty itself right now.