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Tuesday, July 20, 2004 |
Did you happen to read the Peter Shane article Usurping the Voters, published in the Washington Post on the 19th? Here's the crux of the whole thing:
We seem to be devoting a lot of time and energy in this summer of our discontent to thinking about things that could go wrong with the conduct of the November elections. Here's one you probably hadn't thought of.
Suppose that some of the electors -- the people who under our constitutional system conduct the real presidential election some weeks after voters go to the polls -- aren't actually selected by the voters.
Impossible? Not if you give a close reading to the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Bush v. Gore, which finally settled the presidential election of 2000, if not to everyone's satisfaction. Under that decision, there is no guarantee that the electors who are decisive in choosing the next president of the United States will themselves be selected by the people of the United States. That's because the justices ruled in that case that state legislatures have unlimited authority to determine whether citizens in their respective states shall be allowed to vote for president at all.
"The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States," the court said, "unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College."
Imagine, now, a state in which the same party controls both houses of the legislature and the governor's office. There would presumably be no partisan impediment to the state legislature, with the governor's approval, deciding that the majority party in state government shall control the state's electoral vote, regardless of any popular vote in the state. If the Supreme Court's declaration is an accurate statement of the law, there would not be any legal impediment either.
9:47:05 PM  | |
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Bob Herbert of The New York Times had a noteworthy column on July 16th titled Bush's Not So Big Tent about Bush not attending the NAACP conference. (Bush is the first president since Hoover not to attend.) In these paragraphs, Herbert compares Bush's promises at the 2000 convention with what his policies have actually done for African-Americans.
Four years ago, on the first night of the Republican convention, a parade of blacks was hauled before the television cameras (and the nearly all-white audience in the convention hall) to sing, to dance, to preach and to praise a party that has been relentlessly hostile to the interests of blacks for half a century.
I wrote at the time that "you couldn't tell whether you were at the Republican National Convention or the Motown Review."
That exercise in modern-day minstrelsy was supposed to show that Mr. Bush was a new kind of Republican, a big-tent guy who would welcome a more diverse crowd into the G.O.P. That was fiction. It wasn't long before black voters would find themselves mugged in Florida, and soon after that Mr. Bush was steering the presidency into a hard-right turn.
Among the most important props of that 2000 campaign were black children. Mr. Bush could be seen hugging them at endless photo-ops. He said a Bush administration would do great things for them. He promised to transform public education in America. He hijacked the trademarked slogan of the Children's Defense Fund, "Leave No Child Behind," and refashioned it for his own purposes. He pasted the new version, "No Child Left Behind," onto one of the signature initiatives of his presidency, a supposedly historic education reform act.
The only problem is that, to date, the act has been underfunded by $26 billion. A lot of those kids the president hugged have been left behind.
9:36:21 PM | |
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July 16th's feature editorial in the New York Times, titled A Pause for Hindsight, apologizes to its readership for not being more critical of the Administration's talking points for the invasion of Iraq. Consider the opening excerpts:
Over the last few months, this page has repeatedly demanded that President Bush acknowledge the mistakes his administration made when it came to the war in Iraq, particularly its role in misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda. If we want Mr. Bush to be candid about his mistakes, we should be equally open about our own.
During the run-up to the war, The Times ran dozens of editorials on Iraq, and our insistence that any invasion be backed by "broad international support" became a kind of mantra. It was the administration's failure to get that kind of consensus that ultimately led us to oppose the war.
But we agreed with the president on one critical point: that Saddam Hussein was concealing a large weapons program that could pose a threat to the United States or its allies. We repeatedly urged the United Nations Security Council to join with Mr. Bush and force Iraq to disarm.
As we've noted in several editorials since the fall of Baghdad, we were wrong about the weapons. And we should have been more aggressive in helping our readers understand that there was always a possibility that no large stockpiles existed.
To those of us, me included, called by the Republican attack dogs as appeasers, who wanted more stricter measures placed on Saddam via inspections rather than an invasion, this apology is a welcome sight. I hope they have learned their lesson.
9:23:58 PM | |
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