Word: recounting
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...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 law. The dissenters concluded that the majority had "acted unwisely"--which passes for serious trash talk on the high court...
...battle of the courts started with the Florida justices, and it's hard to overstate the boldness of their sweeping recount order. American courts have certainly been historic before: ordering public schools to admit blacks in the 1950s and helping oust President Richard M. Nixon by ordering him to turn over the Watergate tapes in the 1970s. But those decisions were handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, steeped in prestige and equal in the Constitutional scheme to the President or Congress. The Florida court is made of seven people even most Floridians couldn't have picked...
...canvassing boards do not deserve the highly deferential "abuse of discretion" standard Judge Sauls applied in deciding not to second-guess them, the Florida justices said. Better still, the court found that he wrongly held the Gore plaintiffs to an onerous "standard of a reasonable probability" of a recount changing the outcome; it said he failed to notice that the relevant statute had been changed last year. Ouch...
...court also waged a frontal assault on Judge Sauls' fact finding. The justices rejected his conclusion that Gore had not met his burden of showing that sufficient legal votes were rejected to warrant a recount. In part, they relied on what they called "the ultimate Catch-22" in Judge Sauls' approach: he had concluded there were not enough rejected votes without ever looking at the ballots themselves...
Since Election Day, Lieberman has been the recount absolutist. The moral certainty that drove some of his Senate colleagues to distraction--when he voted his conscience instead of his party--has provided crucial ballast here. Al Gore, under pressure known to change his story, his message, his demeanor and his clothes, has resisted the weight of opinion in favor of getting it over rather than getting it correct. This has meant that Lieberman, considered a happy St. Bernard in 12 years in the Senate--"as moral, decent and honorable a man as I've known there," said Senator John McCain...