Talking Points can rant and rave about the transparent partisanship of the Supreme Court’s Saturday decision as much as he wants. But when the New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter says essentially the same thing, well ⦠then you know it really must be true.
(Alas, conservative Talking Points readers may find fault with that analysis. But, hey, if you’re so conservative, what are you doing reading Talking Points in the first place? … Just kidding, just kidding. Talking Points loves his conservative readers too.)
Anyway, back to my story.
Here are three choice grafs from Linda Greenhouse’s article in Sunday’s New York Times:
Justice Scalia said it was “the counting of votes that are of questionable legality” that was “casting a cloud,” not on the process in general but specifically on what Mr. Bush “claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”
In other words, the majority’s justification for the stay was that if the vote counting proceeded and had appeared to make Vice President Al Gore the winner by the time the court could decide the merits of Mr. Bush’s appeal, the Bush position would be untenable as a political matter even if it prevailed as a matter of law.
That justification put the court in the position of seeming to protect Mr. Bush – who has endorsed Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, named to the court by his father, as his ideal justices – from whatever uncomfortable truth the uncounted ballots might reveal. The fact that the justices entered the stay at midafternoon Saturday, with the counting under way and most of it expected to conclude at 2 p.m. on Sunday, gave the court the appearance of racing to beat the clock before an unwelcome truth could come out.
That qualifier ‘seeming’ in the first sentence of the third graf must be the price which common sense must pay to the canons of reportorial objectivity.
