From The Dissident Voice
By Patricia Goldsmith

The American electorate is looking more and more like the polar bear stranded on a shrinking ice floe — still powerful but with democracy melting out from under our feet. Unlike the polar bear, however, we should be able to analyze our situation and take action. The first thing we have to do is accept that certain familiar features of our habitat, which we have depended on in the past, are just gone.

We now have more media outlets than ever before, but their mission seems to be to drown out any molecule of truth. And our inter-dependent voting and justice systems have been reduced to slivers of their former selves.

For example, as time has gone by, the true significance of the Supreme Court’s selection of George W. Bush as president has become more and more painfully clear, in spite of efforts on the part of the media and across the political spectrum to obscure the bald truth: In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court shamelessly sided with a gang of Republican congressional aides swinging baseball bats who originally shut down the vote count and threw the case into the courts.

Jamin Raskin argued in March, 2001, in an article titled Bandits in Black Robes, that Bush v. Gore is easily the worst Supreme Court decision in history — even worse than Dred Scott, because in the case of Scott, justices could truthfully argue that the unamended 1857 (pre-Civil War) Constitution did regard black people as less than human. It was at least consistent. Not so with Bush v. Gore. Raskin says:

In a slapdash job of constitutional interpretation, the conservatives ravaged four foundational relationships in our constitutional system. It usurped the role of the Florida Supreme Court in interpreting state law. It usurped the role of the American people by halting the counting of ballots in a presidential election and effectively choosing the president for them. It usurped Congress’ powers to accept or reject the states’ electoral college votes. And it reversed the proper distribution of powers in federal government by having Supreme Court justices appoint the president rather than vice versa.

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