I got some mail regarding the scene in F911 (which I still haven't seen) about the House members protesting the 2000 vote:
====================================================== FW: Early Election results. . .There was a point in the Moore movie when a joint Congressional session was approving the results of the 2000 election. Several House members spoke to protest the vote but it seems that at least one Senator is required to sign on and not one would. We couldn't figure out why a Kennedy or Wellstone wouldn't do it.
Someone asked Randy Rhodes about it yesterday on Air America and she said that it was Gore's decision. Apparently this would have resulted in a straight party line vote, with the tie being broken by the Vice-President, who happened to be Al Gore. Thus, Al Gore would have been the deciding vote between Bush and Gore for President, and Gore probably figured that the right wing would tear the country apart if this happened, plus, perhaps he just thought it
would be a bad precedent to vote for himself.
Anyway, Gore had the Senators broker some sort of deal involving committee chairmanships, since the Senate was about to turn Republican. Apparently some Democrats were given some sort of bone. ======================================================
This isn't quite consistent with what Nathan posted about this before
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040621/013804.html
which indicated that it was Daschle who "advised Democratic senators not to cooperate." (quoting, um, Robert Novak) And Nathan, you wrote that
"And if some Senators had agreed to challenge the certification, they still would have lost the vote. (One irony of the whole election in 2000 is that if the Supreme Court had never intervened, Bush still would have been certified as President, since given disputed ballots in Florida, the House of Representatives would have voted on which to accept and who won.)"
Nathan, is it the House or the Senate that would have decided on the disputed ballots? Would Gore really have been the one voting on this?
Personally, I don't agree with the strategy, regardless of the details. But I am curious as to what the correct story is behind this, and you are extremely knowledgable about these sorts of things.