The Florida court has had quite a run. First, its ruling extending the deadline for hand recounts was vacated by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court, then its subsequent decision calling for a statewide partial recount was found constitutionally suspect by a 7-2 majority of the Supremes. The 7-2 majority objected to hand recounts on “equal protection” grounds, arguing that they risked treating votes differently from county to county (if not “individual to individual,” as David Boies admitted in oral arguments). Conservatives should be dubious about this line of reasoning, since equal-protection jurisprudence has so often been a cudgel with which liberal judges have beat states about the head and shoulders. Besides which, by this logic, Florida’s entire election system, featuring different voting machines, with different levels of reliability, from one county to the next, would be unconstitutional. More to the point was Chief Justice Rehnquist’s opinion-joined by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas-that found that the Florida court had acted as a quasi-legislature, enacting a new system of vote-counting after Nov. 7. This constituted a violation of Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which grants the power to determine the “manner” of selecting the state’s electors solely to the legislature. It is not clear why the Florida justices didn’t just skip the law degrees and run for the legislature, given their knack for lawmaking.

Jesse Jackson, historian, compared the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore to Dred Scott. He also denied Bush both “honor” and “legitimacy,” threatened a “civil-rights explosion” against “tyranny.” The internal immigration of black Americans into a parallel universe of dependency, pathology, one-party politics, and fantasy is a deeply troubling national fact. But all efforts to address it are poisoned by this clownish hack. Unfortunately we’ll be hearing a lot more from him.