On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Nathan Newman wrote:
> To understand why the Supreme Court majority would so blatantly
> undermine its credibility as it did in this case, you have to see it
> as a sacrifice play - trade off credibility on a whole host of other
> issues in order to try to win on the most fundamental issue and always
> the issue in our partial democracy - who is a citizen and who shall
> rule along the color line of corporate America.
Except haven't they given people like you the shovel to hit them over the head with? You've complained, quite rightly, that racial discrimination has been treated by the mainstream media as an unimportant sideshow. But citing the equal protection clause has suddenly made it central. And it provides a perfect political-legal citation for every grass-roots movement against it. I think they may have given huge momentum to precisely the movement they didn't want to. Which should only build in a month when all the Florida ballots finally get counted and we find Gore won.
And the irony is they didn't have to. They overreached. They could have had the result they wanted simply through the part of their ruling that indicated that in their judgment Florida was now out of time. But they got excited and their masks slipped.
The Jim Crow Five is pretty good. But for some reason I prefer the No Right to Vote Court.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com