The liberal Florida Supremes have now hijacked the executive branch and impounded the legislative branch of the state of Florida’s government. They were able to produce a quick turnaround decision on the Florida vote count, merely by taking David Boies’s testimony and affixing their unanimous signatures at the bottom of it. This, of course, allowed them to get all their holiday shopping done last weekend and still produce a decision.
In the spirit of the new Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Florida Supremes have taken over the campus administration building, and declared a new liberation government. Next thing you know, they’ll be raising tax rates on the top 1 percent of Floridian income earners.
There’s not one whiff of abiding by the rule of law in their decision. As Jim Baker put it in his remarks last night, “Today, Florida’s supreme court rewrote the legislature’s statutory system, assumed the responsibilities of the executive branch, and side-stepped the opinion of the trial court as the finder of fact.”
Baker also went on to say that “all of this is unfair and unacceptable. It is not fair to change the election laws of Florida by judicial fiat after the election has been held. It is not fair to change the rules and standards governing the counting or recounting of votes after it appears that one side has concluded that is the only way to get the votes it needs. And it is also not fair to refuse to count, even once, the ballots of many of our servicemen and women overseas. It is simply not fair, ladies and gentlemen, to change the rules, either in the middle of the game, or after the game has been played.”
Baker has it right. Incredibly, while the Supremes talk about the will of the people, their decision made no mention of the uncounted military absentee ballots. So, about 40% or roughly 1000 military folks will be disenfranchised, and that’s okay to these liberal court activists. Really, they’re defending the will of some people — that is Al Gore people — but not all the people.
The Supremes also neglected to mention a 10-year-old West Palm Beach county legal precedent established on November 2, 1990, by Theresa LePore, a Democratic elections supervisor. In that decision, Ms. LePore wrote that “a chad that is fully attached, bearing only an indentation, should not be counted as a vote.” Indentation-chad counting is the only way that Al Gore can steal this election. The whole point of the Florida Supremes is to allow another five days for pregnant-chad counting, and election stealing.
Former Reagan Justice Department official Victoria Toensing believes there are three constitutional issues now on the table that merit a U.S. Federal Court review of the new-left Florida Supremes. Vicky told me that now that the state court has ruled, it is “ripe” for the Federal District Court in Atlanta to review the case on three grounds:
Numerous vote recounts in selected counties violates the Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection clause by diluting the votes of all the non-recount counties. Second, the Florida Supremes violated due process by changing the state constitution’s mandated election deadlines and other rules. As a result, the Florida court allows for more time for Gorite protests, and less time for Bushie contesting in court. This is especially important to the issue of the military absentee ballots, a point that Team Bush must raise again and again.
Third, Toensing believes that the Florida Supremes have violated the constitutional provision of separation of powers by invading the executive branch’s deadline that elections must be certified in ten days. Also on this point, the Florida Supremes have invaded the state legislature’s deadline, and Ms. Toensing notes that the phrase “equitable powers,” used several times in the court decision, refers uniquely to legislative powers in legal history and tradition, stretching all the way back to English common law in Great Britain.
So it may well be that the Florida vote count will wind up percolating all the way to the U.S. Supremes. It may also be that the Republican Florida legislature will insist on choosing its own slate of electors based on the actual vote count as of the legislative deadline, which was November 17 — two vote counts ago.
Most importantly, Team Bush must emphatically show the American public that the Florida Supremes are a runaway liberal activist group, recklessly charting their own course and running roughshod over state laws and governmental practices. This court is reminiscent of the left-wing California supreme court of the Jerry Brown 1970s, which was presided over by the famous liberal, Rose Byrd. Ronald Reagan and other conservatives made it clear to California voters the extent to which the Byrd court moved towards liberal judicial overreach. Eventually she was defeated and law and order were restored in California.
Whether election law and order can be restored in Florida remains to be seen.