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Understatement of the Year?

Dec 30th, 2008 by admin

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One Response to “Understatement of the Year?”

  1. Another Chris says:
    December 31, 2008 at 9:45 pm

    The two campaigns apparently are unable to follow the Supreme Court’s directive to agree on a process to settle disputes on whether or not some ballots were wrongly rejected.

    Which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

    A standard for sorting and accepting ballots already existed in the statutes. The local elections officials had followed those statutes and produced a pile of wrongly rejected absentees. The Coleman campaign, which was still ahead at that point in time, sued to stop them from being counted because, well, why would they take that risk if they’re ahead?

    Instead of simply reaffirming the standards already on the books, a 3-2 majority ordered the ballots to be counted, but only if under an additional undefined standard that both campaigns had to agree on. As the minority opinion points out, this is completely unnecessary since, one more time – standards already exist on the books – and this additional requirement would only cause a lot of chaos and hanky-panky.

    Suppose someone robbed a 7-11, was caught on camera doing it, was arreseted in the parking lot, etc., and a judge said, “Gosh, the defense is saying their client shouldn’t have to obey the statutes against armed robbery, just ‘cuz. Hm, I can’t make up my mind! I hereby order the prosecution and defense to agree to an additional made-up statute on armed robbery that they’re free to pull out their a**, and this case can’t proceed until they do.” Would this be a competent decision, in anyone’s view? If so, what’s the point of having statutes and judges?

    I think what’s going on here is that the 3 supremes in the majority were operating under a desire to be seen as “above the fray.” Sure, the statutes (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this) were already on the books, but if they just applied them straightforwardly, they’d be coming down completely on Franken’s side. Then they could be accused of bias! They didn’t want people to call them names, so instead, they tried to split the baby in half and created a big mess.

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