Florida Supreme Court example essay topic

INTERPRETING AN EVENT (Rewrite) The 2000 Presidential Election marked an unforgettable event. On November 7, 2000 more than 100 million Americans voted for president. Democratic nominee, Vice-President Al Gore, was anticipating victory once the major television networks, early on election night, projected him to be the winner in the crucial state of Florida (Fitzpatrick 1). Within hours, however, the networks pronounced Florida too close to call.

Early the next morning, Gore's Republican rival, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, was awarded Florida. Just as Gore was about to award publicly to Bush, anxious aides stopped him with news that the vote in Florida was in fact close enough to trigger an automatic recount (Fitzpatrick 1). Unsettled Gore retracted his recognition from the discombobulated Bush, and thus began the epic post-election battle for the presidency. During thirty-six mad days at the end of 2000, two teams of lawyers became involved in one of the most significant and controversial battles in American politics. The fight implicated complex and confusing court cases tried before several levels of judges. The gridlock finally was resolved not by the ballot box but by five justices of an fractured U.S. Supreme Court who, by stopping the statewide manual recount of invalidated ballots that had been authorized by the Supreme Court of Florida, effectively made Bush the nation's forty-third president.

(Fitzpatrick 2). The post-election battle and its startling conclusion deserve close study. Not only for the presidency hanging in balance, but also popular sovereignty and fundamental law are at stake. In a constitutional democracy, the people govern but subject to the rule of law (Murdoch 1). Popular sovereignty and fundamental law are thus in some tension. This picture was turned upside down in the post-election battle of 2000 as citizens sat on the sidelines while the presidential candidates sought victory in courts where judges of sometimes uncertain neutrality used questionable interpretations of law as an extension of partisan politics (Murdoch 2).

Many citizens were left wondering whether the "right" man had ascended to the presidency. The questions remain: Was the Florida Supreme Court right to grant Gore a statewide recount? And was the U.S. Supreme Court right to stop the recount? Defenders of the recount in the Florida Court believe Florida's justices properly read the state's ambiguous election law so as to justify popular sovereignty (Murdoch 2). For example, a law professor Dershowitz insists that in extending the deadline for official recognition of the ballots and granting Gore a statewide manual recount of the votes based upon the standard of "voter intent", the Florida Supreme Court had merely done what courts do all the time: it followed standard principles of constitutional construction to resolve a conflict in the election code by looking to the intent of the legislature, the text of the state constitution, and past case law (Garcia 1). A journalist trained as a lawyer, Jeffrey Too bin agrees that the Florida court acted legally, but he believes it was irresponsible of the Florida justices to grant Gore a statewide recount without first responding to the U.S. Supreme Court's concerns about the legal basis of their earlier decision to extend the deadline for certifying the ballots (Garcia 1).

Republicans saw the Florida high court as a body of partisan Democrats randomly rewriting the state's fundamental election law after the contest was over in order to find phony votes with which they can grant Gore victory (Garcia 1). According to the Republican as the Weekly Standard stated by Dionne and Kristol: Florida's election code was clear and had to be followed if the rule of law is to have any meaning. George will call the Florida justices a "lawless court" that contributed to the "climate of cynicism and trickery Gore has created" by "airily rewriting Florida's election law and applying it retroactively". The National Review, for instance, sees the Florida high court's rulings as reflections of "the naked power of an arbitrary and capricious judiciary" and the products of an "antidemocratic legal culture". Both sides thus call upon popular sovereignty, but while Democrats saw the Florida justices as its friends, Republicans saw them as its enemy.

The U.S. Supreme had a different view. The U.S. Supreme Court's stopped the statewide recount on the grounds that a lack of uniformity in defining "voter intent" denied Bush equal protection of the law and threatened him with "irreparable harm (Garcia 2)". Critics of the decision believe its stressed interpretation of equal protection doctrine mocked fundamental law while Bush rejects popular sovereignty ("Presidential candidates... ). Suggesting that the only harm Bush faced was losing the recount. Dershowitz even accuses several of the justices of "hijacking" the election for purely personal gain in "the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history".

Bibliography

Fitzpatrick, Gerard J. "Bush vs. Gore" Questia. The Online Library Vol. 35, 2002.
Garcia, Howard. "In Bush vs. Gore, Supreme Court Conservatives Brought Disgrace on Their Institution" Boulder Daily Camera. December 9, 2001 Murdoch, Stephen.
Bush vs. Gore Revisited" D.C. bar. District of Columbia Bar. 2003 "Presidential candidate totals changes as Florida recount votes" Internet.
08 November 2000.