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Editorials
Tuesday, November 28, 2000Bush should await
resolution of disputesThe issue: Texas Gov. George W. Bush has declared himself president-elect and has begun assembling a transition team.
DESPITE the Florida secretary of state's certification of votes, the presidential election has not been decided. George W. Bush's own argument that all manually recounted votes should be discounted will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, and Vice President Al Gore has every right -- which he intends to exercise -- to contest the Florida results. The Texas governor's declaration of victory on Sunday was contrivedly premature.
Most Americans would like the election to be over already. Bush was pandering to their withering patience in deliberately overstating it to be so. However, he knew the legal deadline is Dec. 12 for choosing Florida's delegation of 25 to cast the state's votes for president in the Electoral College, giving various arbiters -- and ultimately the courts -- two weeks to resolve disputes over the outcome.
Bush's assignment of running mate Richard Cheney to head a transition team was equally presumptuous and calculating. The General Services Administration's decision to withhold expenditures and office space to a transition team until the election is decided was proper.
Granted, Gore's task is more daunting than before Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican partisan, certified Bush to be the winner. Instead of demanding procedures that he hoped would influence the certification, Gore now must try to overturn that certified result. His right to launch such a post-certification challenge is spelled out in Florida law.
Gore must go to court to order that recounted votes in Palm Beach County -- excluded by Harris -- be included in the vote totals, that 10,000 ballots rejected by counting machines in Miami-Dade County be manually examined for possible inclusion and that 200 ballots inadvertently omitted in Nassau County be included, too. If he were to prevail -- a legal long shot -- his Florida vote total could overtake that of Bush.
Even after Florida's electors are selected, further challenges may be launched. The vice president's demand for manual recounts has been reasonable, considering the extraordinary closeness of the Florida race and the possibility of mechanical malfunctions and other irregularities. However, the longer the battle continues, the more likely Gore's chance of winning the presidency will diminish, along with his long-term political viability.
At this point, Bush is not the president-elect. He may achieve that designation at some point in the near future, but his attempt to create the illusion now is nothing more that putting an inappropriate spin on what remains an undecided election.
Cameras in U.S. court
THE appeal in the presidential election dispute to the U.S. Supreme Court offers a reminder of how antiquated the federal courts remain toward the electronic media. The inability of the American people to see or hear the legal arguments regarding the election before the nation's highest court is absurd.
In a letter rejecting a request by C-Span to televise Friday's hearing before the high court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said a majority on the court "remains of the view that we should adhere to our present practice of allowing public attendance and print media coverage of argument sessions but not allow camera or audio coverage." The audience for the hearing will be about 300.
Ironically, Florida was a pioneer in allowing cameras into state courtrooms. Other jurisdictions, including Hawaii, have embraced the idea that television and radio are necessary ingredients of the people's right to attend public proceedings. The notion that lawyers in courtrooms would be distracted by cameras or encouraged to showboat has been disproved.
Last week's 21/2-hour hearing before the Florida Supreme Court was an example of the positive effect of TV coverage without such negative consequences. "The lawyers were lawyerly, the judges were judicious, the boundaries between the two were clear. It made me proud of the system," said Ronald L. Goldfarb, a Washington lawyer and author of the book, "TV or Not TV: Television, Justice and the Courts."
Forty-eight states allow some form of television coverage in courts but federal courts continue to shun TV. A three-year pilot program for televising civil trials and appeals in two appellate circuits and six federal districts -- Hawaii was not one of them -- lapsed in 1994. Only two of the 13 federal appeals courts have accepted offers to televise some appellate arguments in civil cases.
Justice David H. Souter told a congressional committee four years ago that "the day you see a camera coming into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body." Friday's hearing hopefully will contribute to public awareness of such archaic practices and open federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to cameras before then.
Published by Liberty Newspapers Limited PartnershipRupert E. Phillips, CEO
John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher
David Shapiro, Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
