It's All About the Chads

If you've followed politics in America the last few years, you know that the root cause of all of the battles between Bush and the Democrats is one event - the 2000 Florida recount. The Dems have never gotten over the fact that no matter how hard they tried they were never able to engineer a recount that showed Gore leading, nor was their any possibility under electoral law of a scenario that would have put Gore in the White House. The bitterness that started back then has only grown worse, and the Dems have taken to opposing every initiative of the President based only on their misguided belief that Bush was "selected not elected".

The Supreme Court fight will be the next battle in the war against Bush, and the next battle that the Dems will lose. They're on quite a losing streak, and I don't expect it to end any time soon. Mark Steyn writes today about permanent funk the Dems have found themselves in following the 2000 election:

The Democrats never recovered from the 2000 election. They became obsessed with the "illegitimate" Bush, and carried on obsessing no matter what lively distractions intervened: In time the Twin Towers tumbled, the Taliban crumbled, they're only here today, but hung chads are here to stay. Michael Moore couldn't make a movie about 9/11 and Iraq without a 20-minute chad-dangling opening. Even the chad-free election of 2004 -- the "sequel," as Richard Cohen coyly puts it -- only momentarily dented the party's imperviousness to reality: If you can't get Bush, get Tom Delay, or Karl Rove, or John Bolton, or some other guy nobody's heard of.

Now it's Roberts' turn. Barely had the president finished announcing the nomination when the Dems rushed Sen. Chuck Schumer on air, hunched and five-o'clock-shadowed and looking like a bus-&-truck one-man Nixon revue. Schumer's line was that, as a judge, Roberts had too thin a paper trail. His message seemed to be: Look, we Dems have the finest oppo-research boys in the business and, if we can't get any dirt on this guy, that must mean it's buried real deep and is real bad; the very fact that we can't get anything on him is in itself suspicious. Etc., etc.

Give it up, guys. Here's the John Roberts case that matters: As the Los Angeles Times put it, Roberts "said police did not violate the constitutional rights of a 12-year-old girl who was arrested, handcuffed and detained for eating a French fry inside a train station." We know what the flailing Times is clutching at here: Look, folks, this right-wing nut favors handcuffing schoolgirls for eating French fries.

No, he doesn't. As he wrote in his opinion, "The question before us, however, is not whether these policies were a bad idea, but whether they violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution" -- i.e., it may be bad legislation poorly implemented, but it's not his job to make the law. If you don't like public-transit policy on French fries, elect new councilors who'll change it. That's how free societies function.

The Democrats drew exactly the wrong lesson from their chad fever. If the case teaches anything, it's the importance of winning at the ballot box, which you do by promoting clear ideas confidently stated. The Dems prefer to leave it to the Divine Right of Judges. You might too if you believed in gay marriage and partial-birth abortion, but, simply as a matter of practical politics, it's disastrous for the party. Poor sad Richard Cohen, unabletomoveon.org after five years, is a fine emblem for the Democrats: Ask not for whom the chad hangs, it hangs for thee.