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Robe Warriors Backed By The Supreme Court, Republicans Stage A Coup. By Susan Zakin FOR WEEKS, THE pundits have been saying that American complacency over the Republican attempt to steal the election is a testament to democracy, a tribute to the wisdom of the founding fathers, a paean to the country's stability. But I think people are finally starting to get it. Even Maureen Dowd. Dowd, a columnist at The New York Times, stirs ambivalent reactions among reporters. When she was covering the reign of Bush I, she was hilariously catty. (I never trust a woman who isn't.) The Times put her on a long leash, letting her spice up her news coverage with asides about Barbara Bush's taste in clothes or Poppy's pecadillos. Then Dowd was promoted to columnist. She seemed to be reeling from the newfound freedom. Dowd's coverage became all nastiness, all the time. Of course, I liked Bill Clinton, who was her new target, so that might have been part of it. But let's face it, everyone needs an editor. (Except me, of course. And Jim Nintzel.) The thing that bothered me was that Dowd didn't seem to have the core of whatever you want to call it, morality, idealism, that motivates good reporters. Or if she had it, she seemed to have misplaced it. It's great to bash pols, but the flip side is reminding people what a good pol would do. Last Sunday changed that. It was the first time I was convinced that Dowd worshipped at the altar of truth. Her column was hilarious, as usual, dissing both Gore and Bush as the Insufferable and the Insufficient, respectively. But the bottom line was this: "A sour James Baker called the Florida Supreme Court ruling 'sad for our democracy.' Actually, oh Velvet Hammer, you've got it backward," Dowd wrote. "When you try to obscure truth, as the Bush crowd has, that is sad for our democracy. When you try to reveal truth, as the Florida Supreme Court did, that is swell for our democracy." Thank you, Maureen. The thing that keeps getting obscured in the morass of detail that's thrown about by reporters covering the endless campaign is this simple fact: All the votes have not been counted. The Republican argument that a recount would be irremediably tainted by politics really doesn't wash with observers from both parties on the scene. Sure, there will be mistakes, or even bias. But does that mean that votes shouldn't be counted at all? Why have an election? Reality check, folks. The Republicans have staged a low-intensity putsch, starting with Tom DeLay's very own mini-Kristallnacht. First, DeLay and Trent Lott send their white-collar thugs to Miami to intimidate the vote-counters, who dropped their efforts to count ballots. Then the five conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court decide that making a decision on the presidency--even the wrong one--is more important than counting votes. Especially since rushing a decision favors the Republican candidate, who would almost certainly lose if all the votes were counted. What does that say to you? To me, it says coup d'état. Republicans will do anything to win. We've seen this in our small-town politics. Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup ran a highly efficient but inarguably dirty campaign, trouncing Democrat Molly McKasson, whose dogged refusal to pander on water politics made her possibly the most inept campaigner in human history. Even with her self-immolating tendencies, McKasson's candidacy was strong enough to inspire Walkup's supporters to mount a nasty, highly personal soft-money hit campaign, which the smiling glad-hander pretended he didn't know about and couldn't stop. Nobody brought up the question of why we should put a man in charge of the city who couldn't control his own political supporters. My Republican friends would argue that Democrats would do anything to win, too. Certainly Gore's efforts to make every vote count have been, shall we say, strategic. But in this case, Gore is, for the most part, right. Even the most rabid Republicans have a hard time arguing that Democrats have the same killer instinct that Republicans like Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott exhibit on a regular basis. Naked power is the raison d'être of these guys. They are thugs. They proved it in Miami when they sent staffers and shills out to stage what conservative Wall Street Journal commentator Paul Gigot termed "a bourgeois riot." But the Supreme Court? The corruption of democracy's last resort seems to have woken the great beast. In Monday's New York Times, court reporter Linda Greenhouse quoted Terrance Sandalow, a law professor and the former dean of the University of Michigan Law School. Sandalow is a judicial conservative who said he opposed Roe vs. Wade and supported the nomination of Robert H. Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sandalow called the Supreme Court's decision to stop the vote-counting in Florida "an unmistakably partisan decision without any foundation in law." An acquaintance of mine, a charming lawyer who cultivates a zen detachment from the great issues of the day, finally lost his cool over this one. "I can't seem to pry my jaw up from off my chest," he wrote me in an e-mail. "The idea that the Supreme Court feels sufficiently politically impervious that it can ignore ballots and choose who will be president is one of the most shocking developments in the history of our democracy. I am not given to hysterical pronouncements, but this is just evil." He pointed out that two of Justice Antonin Scalia's sons work for law firms linked to George W. Bush. "This just stinks," he said. If the Supreme Court doesn't find a way to rev up the recount again, we may finally reach the constitutional crisis that all the pundits have been congratulating us for avoiding. Maybe it's better this way. Let's hope so.
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