There was speculation that the Senate could reject the Florida votes altogether, which would have left neither candidate with a majority. At that point, we'd be back to recounting votes-- an option barred by the Supreme Court at that point-- or throw it to the House of Representatives for a vote under the provisions of Amendment XII where the House votes (in a weird system) when no candidate receives a majority.
So even if the Senate had voted to reject the Florida votes, that wouldn't have automatically led to Gore being President. Most likely, the whole result would have ended up in the House for a vote, where Bush would have won in any case.
Everyone agrees that the electoral college is the bastard child of the Constitution, where resolutions in close vote inevitably mean a legitimation crisis since the rules are just not clear.
Yes, Gore definitely decided to act "for the good of the country" in condeding the election and I was pissed when he did so. But by the time we got to the vote in January, we were past the point of gaining anything useful from playing around with the electoral votes (and I doubt that Zell Miller or other conservative Dems would have supported throwing the country back into partisan conflict again). So the Senate deals cut to weaken the GOP majority power was not an unreasonable concession to extract, especially given that Bush was going to win in almost any likely scenario at that point.
Nathan
----- Original Message ----- From: "Seth Kulick" <skulick at linc.cis.upenn.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 11:54 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Contesting the 2000 vote - question for Nathan
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.
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