Word: argumentative
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Through a week of melting hopes, Gore was a block of ice. "I'm not going to speculate on what the outcome might be," Gore said on Tuesday, though people thought they already knew it. He watched every argument, tracked every brief, read all the Florida papers and phoned the editors, pressing his case. All around him, Democrats were growing resigned; even close aides "just want it to be over," said one, and their verbs began to shift to the past tense. One reason his speechwriter had not drafted a concession speech was his own superstition that...
...seemed clear at oral argument in the first round that the Justices were split on partisan grounds. "The most worrisome thing," says University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, "was that the conservatives just gave Gore's lawyer a hard time, and vice versa." And the curt order the court issued Saturday showed the rift is still there. The dissenters issued a stern rebuke to the majority. By stopping the recount, Justice Stevens wrote for all four dissenters, the majority was abandoning its "venerable rules," including the well-established principle of deferring to state courts on questions of state...
...early last week, you heard the consensus of the legal pundits. Florida's Supreme Court was running scared. It had been slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court Monday and told to rethink its decision ordering manual recounts. And the experts were fixated on the fact that at oral argument last Thursday, Chief Justice Charles T. Wells asked whether his court even had a right to hear the case. The Florida justices, conventional wisdom held, were looking for a way to bow out gracefully from a showdown with the U.S. Supreme Court...
...Florida Four--the justices who voted for the recounts--are all outsiders of one sort or another. Quince has spoken publicly about facing racism and sexism in her career: at her first trial as a lawyer, the judge assumed she was the defendant. (And at the first oral argument in this case, when other justices were scrupulously referred to as "Your Honor," Quince was at one point addressed as "Ma'am.') Harry Lee Anstead, who is white, was raised by a single mother in a housing project. R. Fred Lewis, a native of West Virginia, keeps a dish of coal...
...longer. But it is Bush who got the stay--and Bush who the majority said would be harmed if the counting continued. What would the harm be? It could, Scalia writes, cast "a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." It's a tricky argument: if the court wants to throw out the votes in the end, it would still be free to do so. But Scalia seems to be admitting that the court is afraid that once the votes are counted--once the genie is out of the bottle--the American public...