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- Wednesday, 13 December 2000 -
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W'S COUP D'ETAT
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By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/121300a.html

Let it be remembered that Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the loser across the
United States by a third of a million votes, "won" the presidency through
two key acts of raw power.

Bush's campaign sponsored a violent demonstration by Republican activists
as ballots were about to be counted on Nov. 22. He then enlisted partisan
Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent a statewide recount in
Florida before a Dec. 12 deadline.

On Nov. 22, about 150 rioters -- led by Republican congressional staffers
dispatched from Washington -- charged the offices of the Miami-Dade County
canvassing board as it was about to commence a partial recount of votes.
With the mob roughing up Democrats and pounding on the walls, the
canvassing board abruptly reversed itself and decided not to count those
votes after all.

Rather than criticize this bizarre attack on what was then a court-ordered
process, Bush reveled in its success.

His campaign sponsored a celebration for the demonstrators the next night
at a swanky hotel in Fort Lauderdale. The "president-elect" even called to
joke with the rioters about their Miami operation, according to the Wall
Street Journal [Nov. 27, 2000]. At the party, singer Wayne Newton crooned
Danke Schoen.

Then, after two more weeks of delays, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a
partial statewide recount to examine ballots that had been kicked out by
machines for supposedly having no choice for president.

On Saturday, Dec. 9, facing a deadline of Dec. 12 for certification of
Florida's electors, vote counters across the state began examining these
so-called "under-votes."

In the first few hours, the counters found scores of ballots with clear
votes for president that had been missed by the machines. Other ballots
were set aside for a judicial determination about whether a vote was
registered or not.

With Bush's lead at less than 200 votes and slipping, the Texas governor
played his trump card. He turned to his five arch-conservative allies on
the U.S. Supreme Court.

By a 5-4 majority, the court -- for the first time in U.S. history --
stopped the counting of votes cast by American citizens for president. The
majority consisted of Justices William Rehnquist, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra
Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.

In a written explanation, Scalia made clear that the purpose of the
extraordinary injunction against counting votes was to prevent Bush from
losing his lead and having "a cloud" cast over the "legitimacy" of his
presidency if the court decided to throw out the new votes.

Three days later, on Tuesday night only two hours before the Dec. 12
deadline was to expire, the same five justices issued a complex ruling that
reversed the Florida Supreme Court's recount order. The U.S. Supreme Court
cited a hodgepodge of "constitutional" issues, including complaints about
the lack of consistent standards in the Florida recount.

After having delayed any remedy up to the deadline, Bush's five allies then
demanded that any revised plan and recount be completed within two hours, a
patently impossible task.

Twisting 'Equal Protection'

The five conservatives may have taken pleasure, too, in applying "equal
protection" arguments to prevent the recount. Historically, Supreme Court
liberals have used "equal protection" principles to strike down
discrimination against African-Americans and other persecuted minorities.

Now, the five conservative justices were hoisting the liberals on their own
petard. The "equal protection" argument asserted that the votes of other
Florida citizens would be diluted if the ballots that had been kicked out
by voting machines were counted using standards that varied from county to
county.

The irony of the argument, however, couldn't be missed. In wealthier voting
precincts, new optical scanners were used to count votes and did the
counting so efficiently that few of the votes cast for president were
missed.

In poorer precincts, where African-Americans and retired Jewish voters were
concentrated, older punch-card systems were used which failed to record
thousands of votes for president. Just as poor neighborhoods ended up with
older textbooks in their schools, they got stuck with antiquated voting
machines.

To correct this imbalance and to count those votes, the Florida Supreme
Court had ordered hand examination of those ballots statewide. In a few
hours on Saturday, that recount discovered scores of missed votes.

But the U.S. Supreme Court -- long the protector of the downtrodden in
American society -- was revealing itself in its new right-wing form. In
stopping the recount, the court's pro-Bush majority granted greater weight
to the votes cast in wealthier precincts.

The traditional use of the "equal protection" principle of the U.S.
Constitution had been turned on its head. The Constitution was now being
cited to protect the privileged to the detriment of the poor.

Besides this ironic interpretation of "equal protection," the U.S. Supreme
Court relied on "reasoning" that -- if applied fairly -- would have judged
the entire Florida election unconstitutional.

While excluding the hand recounts ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, the
U.S. Supreme Court allowed the inclusion of earlier hand recounting done in
Republican areas that had boosted Bush's total by hundreds of votes.

Also left in were scores of overseas absentee ballots, heavily favoring
Bush, that were counted after some Republican counties waived legal
requirements almost entirely.

Supposedly to avoid disenfranchising U.S. military personnel, ballots were
accepted even though they lacked signatures, witnesses and dates. In a
couple of cases, overseas ballots were faxed in and counted, clearly in
violation of state law.

In two better known cases in Seminole and Martin counties, Republicans were
allowed to fix errors on absentee ballot applications also in violation of
state law. The state courts ruled, however, that these ballots should be
counted, despite the irregularities, because the sanctity of the vote was
more important than technical voting rules.

Those situations all favored Gov. Bush.

Judicial Politics

Given the lack of consistent standards throughout Florida and the waiving
of technical legal requirements in other cases, a logical extension of the
U.S. Supreme Court's logic would be that the entire presidential election
in the Florida should be thrown out as unconstitutional.

Or -- if logic were again followed honestly rather than politically -- the
imperfect remedy of examining and possibly counting thousands of
"under-votes" should have been allowed to go forward.

But at those two crucial moments when American democracy hung in the
balance, Gov. Bush and his advisers turned first to violent demonstrators
to attack the offices of vote counters and then to political allies on the
U.S. Supreme Court to complete the coup d'etat.

In the memorable words of Justice Scalia, the leading Bush partisan, the
majority's concern was that a count of Florida's vote that showed Bush to
be the loser -- when the court might later make him the winner -- would not
square with the need for "democratic stability."

In a dissenting opinion on Dec. 12, Justice John Paul Stevens, an appointee
of President Gerald Ford, said the majority's action in blocking the
Florida recount "can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of
the work of judges throughout the land."

Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointees of President
Bill Clinton, said in another dissent, "Although we may never know with
complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential
election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's
confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Yet, beyond those stern words about the U.S. Supreme Court's mockery of
democracy, worse could lie ahead.

The nation now must be aware that the U.S. Supreme Court -- long trusted as the
protector of the nation's democratic principles -- has been transformed
into a vehicle for upholding whatever partisan legal strategies George W.
Bush and his incoming Justice Department choose to direct against those who
stand in the way.

The "rule of law" could fast become a code word for tyranny.

With its Dec. 12 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has marked itself as the
ultimate weapon for its favored politicians to wield against their enemies.
That is the final cautionary tale of Election 2000, as the nation enters a
dangerous new era.

In the end, history must record that the U.S. Supreme Court made George W.
Bush the "winner" of the presidency, though he was the loser of the popular
vote, both nationally and apparently in the crucial state of Florida.

Copyright 2000 The Consortium for Independent Journalism.

PAN-AFRICAN NEWS WIRE
The Pan-African Research and Documentation Center
211 SCB Box 47, Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202
E-mail: ac6123@wayne.edu
- Weekly Dispatch, Wednesday, 13 December 2000 -

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A RIGHT WING POLITICAL COUP IS SOLIDIFIED IN THE UNITED STATES
Supreme Court overturns the basis for a universal franchise
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Editorial Review By Abayomi Azikiwe, PANW

A right-wing political coup has effectively occured in the United States.
Governor George W. Bush, Jr. has assumed the role of President-elect after
the mass disenfranchisment of hundreds of thousands of registered voters in
the state of Florida as well as other regions throughout the country.

On election day it was announced on the major news wire services that
Vice-President Al Gore, the candidate for the Democratic Party, had won
Florida by a clear margin. Later that evening, the claim was reversed after
a press conference held by the Bush family in their election suite.

Soon after this moment of political reclaimation, the state was later
declared for Bush, leading to the announcement on all major corporate
networks that George W. Bush, Jr. had won Florida, and consequently the
race for President.

However, by 3:30 am it was a dramatic increase in votes for Gore and then
the race became "too close to call", according to the pundits and talking
heads in the capitalist controlled press. Right before dawn, William Daley,
the campaign manager for Gore, addressed the press in Nashville saying that
they would not concede the elections until an exhaustive count was made.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case in the state of Florida. Soon
news emerged of police checkpoints in African-American communities near
areas where the population would be more prone to vote against the
ultra-right politics of George W. Bush, Jr. In areas around Jacksonville,
in Duval County, people have submitted sworn statements on efforts designed
to limit the ability of African-Americans to cast their ballots.

This pattern was repeated throughout the state of Florida. From the
so-called "Butterfly Ballots", to the "corrections" made to absentee
Republican votes, the entire operation could not pass the inspection of any
international team of election observers. Despite the undercount of tens of
thousands of votes and the disqualification of tens of thousands of more
African-American, Hispanic and working class citizens of Florida, the
Republican controlled US Supreme Court stopped the counting of the
discarded ballots and declared that this would damage Bush. In a later
ruling on Tuesday, in essence, the US high court has reverted backed to the
legal culture prevailing before the Reconstruction era.

In a 5-4 split decision the court upheld the right of the political forces
opposed to universal enfranchisment--theoretically placed in the law
through the 14th Amendment, 15 Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
more significantly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was won after the
deaths, beatings and arrests of scores of Civil Rights activists in the
South--to hinder, obstruct, undercount and deny due process to broad
sections of the US population based on race, national origin, class,
religion and gender. This of course was done while the international media
was intently focused.

Therefore, it is deemed perfectly "constitutional" that Africans Hispanics,
Jewish-Americans and any social group or class within the population that
does not support such an agenda, does not, as in the infamous Dred Scott
decision of 1857, "have any right that a white man is bound to respect."

The Conceding by the Democrats

What is important in understanding the recent assumption of executive power
by the Republican right, is that the fight against them extends far beyond
the "Gore vs. Bush" parameters placed upon this critical issue by the
corporate media.

Gore's concession speech on Dec 13 illustrates that the Democratic Party
cannot adequately represent the interests of many of the social forces that
placed it in a position where it could have maintained the White House amid
such a tremendous right-wing onslaught during Election 2000. Corporate
media pundits had predicted a Bush victory by a substantial 6 to 8 percent
margin.

Nonetheless, there was a sizable and historic turnout among
African-Americans, women, African-Caribbean naturalized voters, trade
unionists, Hispanic-Americans, etc. People who voted in large numbers in
urban and other areas, saw the elections as a way of sending a message to
the proponents of the ultra right-wing agenda exemplified by the
Bush-Cheney ticket.

The Bush family has a track record of opposition to Labor rights, civil
rights, affirmative action, environmental preservation and enhancement,
women's rights, gay rights, the rights of senior citizens and military
veterans. The President-elect's father is the former director of Central
Intelligence in the United States--which by anyone's standards has a
horrendous record of political destabilization, assassination, bribery,
extortion and the prevention of the right to self-determination of
historically oppressed peoples.

Moreover, Gov. Bush has presided over more executions in the state of Texas
than any other official in US history--in excess of 130. In June he
executed Shaka Sankofa, a self-educated political prisoner, who maintained
his innocence to the end of his life at the hands of the lethal injecters.
Bush defended the execution, while Gore did nothing to speak out against
such a travesty of justice.

Earlier that year he had executed Kamau "Ponchai" Wilkerson, who upheld his
legal argument that his case was not one involving a capital offense. Yet
this death row inmate was also killed with impunity and arrogance by George
Bush, Jr.

Such political forces can only be fought with an independent grass roots
movement that has placed the interests of the nationally oppressed, working
class people and women, as the primary basis for the transformation of the
society. Gore's concession only reveals the willingness of the Democratic
Party to continue down the present road aimed at the restriction of basic
fundamental human rights in the United States.

Gore's team sought to fight the Bush right-wing coup through a legal route
utilizing the courts. Such a direction exclusively could not have hoped to
win, because of the political character of the US Supreme Court has been
shaped by previous Republican administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan and
Bush. Clarence Thomas, a right-wing protege of the Reagan-Bush era during
the 1980s and early 1990s, has no qualification to even sit on the court.
During the course of these historic deliberations, Thomas sat silently,
saying absolutely nothing. He then voted to give the presidency to the son
of the man who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1991.

If the Democratic Party leadership is prepared to go along with the sharp
turn towards Fascism in the political structure of the United States, then
it deserves being overthrown in such an open fashion in a country that
proclaims to be a democratic nation--a leading force in the world for
genuine human equality.

In reality Gore won the popular vote clearly with a nearly 400,000 margin
above Bush. In Florida, researchers have estimated that if the votes had
been counted fairly, Gore would have won by at least 23,000 votes.
Ironically, many of the disqualified voters were Africans and other
nationally oppressed groups. Yet this phenomena, so critical to the success
of the political coup, was not mentioned at all by the Gore legal team or
the candidate himself.

Mainstream Civil Rights organizations, such as the NAACP requested a
Justice Department investigation into the gross denial of African-American
voting rights in Florida. Despite the fact that the Democrats control the
White House, Clinton never stepped in to halt the widespread fraud and
disenfranchisment that prevailed in the state.

What is more outrageous about the entire coup, is that the brother of the
candidate is the governor of the state. The implications of such a factor
in the stealing of the elections, was never properly examined by the
corporate press, particularly the television networks.

 >From Failure to Victory

Where did the Democratic Party fail? More so in its inability to act as an
agent for genuine social change in the US. Consequently, a mass party is
needed to fight and defeat the right-wing--to overturn the
prison-industrial complex, national oppression, institutional racism and to
create a trully just and equal society.

Out of the great political coup of "Election 2000", people must galvanize a
campaign to block the implementation of the Bush right-wing agenda and
political program. However, such a movement must be independent of the
two-party system which cannot represents its interest adequately.

The growth of the prison-industrial-complex under the Reagan-Bush era, and
the Clinton era of the 1990s, will escalate at a more rapid rate under the
direction of George, Jr. His hostile opposition to the gains of the civil
rights era will be acted upon swiftly during the Bush term in office.

These oppressed groups in the United States have no other choice but to
resist the new right-wing assault on basic human rights. They must focus on
those social forces that seek to reduce them to a state of universal
slavery and indentured servitude once again.

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