Objectively intelligent.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

I think it actually all comes down to hanging chads. The count was close enough so how one interpretted a number of thousands of challenged votes would determine the outcome. Unlike this time, I think most of those were good challenges - there was something about the ballots that rendered them potentially ambiguous. It ended in a very bad way, with an explicitly partisan Supreme Court decision.

I'm not interested in relitigating the substantive issues that the US Supreme Court decided when it halted ongoing state-court proceedings. The point, which seems pretty obvious, is that having the election decided in that fashion was bad for democracy. There is a direct line between the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision and the theory concocted by Republicans twenty years later that they can disregard a state's votes if they have the votes in Congress. Twenty years ago, their anti-democratic theories involved the federal courts. This year, when they lost in the federal courts, that didn't stop them. Democracy doesn't die all at once, but in steps.



Which is not to say that the damage he's done is fatal. It's up to us, now.