It really and truly is just about too easy to do this, but Antonin Scalia brought this upon himself today. To say that Al Gore initiated the Supreme Court challenge to the 2000 presidential election, as Scalia recently claimed in a speech, is so patently untrue and ridiculous that I almost shouldn’t even bother to post about it.
For anyone who chooses to forget what happened (and in a way, I can’t entirely blame you), Gore won a legal victory in Florida to resume the vote recount, but the Bush team, having exhausted all possibilities of winning in Florida, appealed to the Supremes. They then said that they would issue a ruling promptly because of the timeliness of the vote recount and the issue of seating the Florida electors before December 12 (which became an albatross for David Boies and the Gore legal team because of a truly catastrophic legal blunder). The Supremes then ran out the clock and ruled that there was not enough time to resume the recount because it would hurt the chances of Bush, the presumptive winner of Florida, being able to claim the Presidency, and our esteemed jurists perversely used the equal protection statute as the basis for their ruling.
Also, as you can read from this link, Scalia’s brand of corporate conservatism runs in the family.
One more thing; I seem to recall this instance of Justice Scalia showing his true stripes, as well as this one (glad I was wrong about Scalia getting the Chief Justice nod).
Update 11/23: Al Franken egged him on a bit, but Scalia is never one to reign in his pomposity anyway, as we know.
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