Useful Fools

A 9th Circuit Court panel has ruled that California cannot go ahead with its recall election. The 9th, which is the most overturned Appeals Court in the land, routinely agrees with the most extreme leftist and politically correct arguments.

There is little doubt that this ruling will be overturned (as the panel well knows), but it will serve a partisan purpose (as the panel also well knows): it will allow Democrats to whine that the outcome of the recall is illegitimate.

Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage with their assertion that “Bush stole the Florida election:”

• It has mobilized their base and made it harder for Bush to govern.
• It has delegitimatized Bush in the eyes of Europeans, who do not understand the American electoral system, helping the Democrats with their Tranzi (trans-national progressive) agenda (and incidentally harming America’s security and war efforts).
• It is another way to wave the race card.

Now, if a Republican wins the governorship after the Circuit Court is overruled, he will be “illegitimate.” He will have “stolen” the election. Alternatively, if a Democrat wins, it will be “in spite of the handicap of a system that favors the white and rich”.

There are other, somtimes ironic aspects of this ruling:

• The three judges in the panel were all appointed by Democrat presidents (Clinton and Carter).
• The case was brought by the ACLU, which has proven to be a reliable and consistent tool of the left wing and politically correct forces.
• The case is a result of a Federal Court intervening in a state election, something that the Democrats loudly decried in the 2000 presidential election.
• Even worse, in Florida the reason for Federal jurisdiction was that it was a Federal election, but in this case it is only a state election, removing the Federal jurisdiction asserted in Florida. Thus the ACLU had to make an argument based on civil rights laws.
• The argument depends on the alleged discrepancy in voting machine technology between districts, even though Davis, the beneficiary of the argument, was twice elected with that same discrepancy in place. Furthermore, Davis is the governor who could have removed the discrepancy.
• The ACLU, which filed this lawsuit, objected to the Supreme Court’s actions in the Florida case. They then turned around and filed a blizzard of lawsuits on their newly discovered idea that any variation in voting technology is not allowed, even after they ignored the loss of rights to military voters in the 2000 election.