Editor’s note: This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer who lives in North Calais.
As we approach Election Day it is increasingly likely hundreds of thousands of legitimately cast ballots will go uncounted — discarded by an unprecedented series of partisan decisions by a hand-picked, right-leaning Supreme Court, bolstered earlier this week by the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, the current president’s third SCOTUS appointment. While in reality, polls show Joe Biden comfortably ahead and Democrats poised to retake control of the Senate, we should remember, times have changed and reliance on reality may be doomed to failure.
It feels as though our sanity is at stake as national well-being is more than countered by a carefully orchestrated rush to madness. As the New Hampshire Union Leader, a prominent conservative newspaper, endorsed Biden last week, their first endorsement of a Democrat in over 100 years, there was much speculation that it mattered little, given print journalism’s decreasing influence, coupled with the Granite State’s paltry four electoral votes. Our trepidation over Tuesday is exacerbated by four years of mass exhaustion, rendering us nearly incapable of untangling the confusion permeating this election cycle.
Although we’ve a tendency to pin the blame on the last four years, current electoral hysteria has its roots in the first presidential election of this century, the 2000 Florida debacle known as Bush v. Gore, which opened the door to the kind of judicial intervention that may very well swing 2020 to the GOP even if voters decide otherwise. While Tuesday is the day we have anticipated since 2016, our focus has been on pivotal states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida (again) and their combined 69 electoral votes. But we would do well to recall the surprisingly simple way all this could have been avoided.
With “hanging chads,” screaming arguments, bused-in Republican “activists,” 2000 came down to agonizing weeks of wrangling in the Sunshine State, with the election result eventually turning on the controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decision to end the recount, anointing Bush by a margin of 0.009%. Al Gore could have saved himself — and perhaps the rest of us — a lot of second guessing, diffusing our collective Ralph Nader hatred while hot wiring the unraveling of the Republican Party by simply winning New Hampshire.
Our neighbor to the east and its four tiny electoral votes, an afterthought in most elections, would have given Gore the 270 necessary to become president, rendering Bush’s win in hotly contested Florida irrelevant, with no path to victory. Barack Obama once said, perhaps regrettably, “Elections have consequences,” and this one had more than we realized at the time. However awful were the Bush-Cheney years with terrorist attacks, subsequently invading the wrong country on doctored intelligence, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, and leaving the country with the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, having the Supreme Court decide an election, set a precedent that may come back to haunt us three days after Halloween.
In fact, it has already begun. Earlier this week on a 5-3 vote, SCOTUS scuttled a federal judge’s decision permitting Wisconsin to count ballots received up to Nov. 9 as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. This single decision — coupled with the delays expected by a politically undermined postal service — could easily disenfranchise over 100,000 voters. The foundation of this decision, termed “terrifying” by Slate, was partially based on Brett Kavanaugh’s twisting of an article by NYU law professor Richard Pildes which in reality, contradicted Kavanaugh’s argument. But, as mentioned, reality is on life support.
Adding fuel to the fire of fake voter fraud allegations he began shortly after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, the president tweeted a bare 15 minutes after Kavanaugh’s opinion: “Big problems and discrepancies with mail in ballots all over the USA. Must have final totals on November 3rd.” Twitter concealed the tweet, warning of the “disputed” content about “How to participate in an election” but could do nothing about any misinformation coming directly from the justice.
Even worse, a similar situation exists in North Carolina, like Wisconsin, a “tipping point” state where three judges on a federal appeals court blocked the state’s deadline extension by citing elements of Bush v. Gore, urging Republicans to “immediately” bring their case before the Supreme Court. The state GOP complied, timing their request to coincide with Barrett’s placement on the court.
If, as expected, Barrett joins the ultraconservatives, it is likely SCOTUS will prevent the counting of possibly decisive ballots in two states that right now are trending Democratic. And if memories of 2000 are sending shivers up your spine, you have perhaps a far more compelling rationale than you may realize. At that time, Bush’s legal team ironically included John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
So confident is the White House that this trio will again come through, negating American’s stated preference and — for the third time in the last 20 years — insert a Republican in the White House without a popular vote majority, that on Tuesday the administration issued a press release outlining first term “accomplishments” literally screaming: “ENDING THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC,” even as infections were skyrocketing and deaths approached 230,000.
In eight tumultuous years, George Bush was in way over his head yet nonetheless evangelically certain of his decisions, never mind that many were from the “gut” based on little or no accurate information. But the assertion of a White House senior staffer, ludicrous at the time, feels weirdly prescient in retrospect. As Ron Suskind reported in the New York Times, the aide said the journalist was in “the reality based community … that’s not the way the world works anymore … we’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.”
In 2004 we didn’t take the remark very seriously. If we did, Gore may have won in New Hampshire and objective reality wouldn’t be on Tuesday’s ballot.
