One More Round for Bush vs Gore [View All]

[kskiska]

Tuesday, September 16, 2003; Page A01

Just last February, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a dissenter in the historic 2000 election case that handed victory to President Bush, told a law school audience in San Diego that Bush v. Gore was a "one of a kind case," adding: "I doubt it will ever be cited as precedent by the court on anything."

But yesterday, a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit essentially declared that the legal fallout of the 2000 case is not so easily contained.

(snip)

If the panel ruling is not reversed by a larger 9th Circuit body, the Supreme Court justices, for whom the stress and strain -- both personal and institutional -- of 2000 is still a fresh memory, will face a choice. They can stay out of the California case and risk permitting what they may view as a debatable interpretation of Bush v. Gore to stand, or they can plunge in and assume the risk that they will once again be criticized for partisanship no matter what they decide.

Bush v. Gore held for the first time that the Constitution's equal protection clause, which protects citizens from arbitrarily disparate treatment at the hands of state authorities, can be applied to the methods states use to tally votes. Previously, election methods had been thought to be mostly the province of state officials.

The court ruled that a statewide manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court to account for uncounted punch-card ballots, many of which were marred by "hanging chads" and the like, would be conducted according to wildly varying rules, making it impossible for the state to treat everyone equally within the short time available.

For the liberal interest groups and lawyers who have been fighting California's recall, Bush v. Gore has mutated from reviled electoral coup to legitimate legal weapon.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16011-2003Sep15.html