President Bush will be in Cincinnati on Monday at a Federalist Society event on "The Presidency and the Courts" where he is scheduled to deliver an address. His speech will coincide with the opening of the Supreme Court's 2008-09 term. Other parts of the program include a speech by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, and panels featuring the likes of former SG Paul Clement, Ed Whelan, and Professor Michael Gerhardt of UNC, among many others. The event is sold out, but should be available by webcast here.
I am not sure how significant the President's speech will be — he seems to be a particularly lame duck at this point (unless he thinks the Supreme Court will give him a third term) — but the rest of the conference looks potentially interesting.
UPDATE: The text of the President's speech is here.
I know it's early, but this is my nominee for best snark of the week.
Perhaps in the Bushverse, a not implausible belief.
Do you have some assurance that the other speakers will be significant?
Or are you saying that no former or soon-to-be-former President has anything of relevance to say about "The Presidency and the Courts"?
Or are your comments reserved by some reason for the current President?
Maybe Zombie Reagan can offer more nuance and insight...
Ditto. Whatever else he may have failed at I think most conservatives/Republicans are very pleased with Roberts and Alito. Although the Miers bit was kind of a joke.
It's become so fashionable to criticize politicians that we've lost all sight of the fact that they do have experience that many of us will never have. Yes, Senator Kennedy is no Einstein and President Bush seems to have been hit on the head with an apple without receiving any Newtonian revelation , but that doesn't mean that the Senator and the President have nothing of interest to say about government.
They've already given him two, why not a third?
[NOTE: I deleted the repeat postings. -- JHA]
However, I doubt that the actual speech WILL BE interesting. Rather, he'll repeat the same old warmed over conservative BS about following the law and not making it.
The Supreme Court didn't "give" him a first or second term. Under the constitutional system, he won them outright. Following the 2000 election, every recount conducted by the various groups who set out to undermine the Florida result indicated that Bush won Florida no matter how many recounts were done. That being so, the Supreme Court's "intrusion" into the race ultimately had no effect on the correct result.
And to the extent the Supreme Court "intruded," it should not be forgotten that it was Gore, not Bush, who sought relief in the courts. Had Gore simply conceded, as did Richard Nixon in 1960 (despite the vote fraud in TX and IL), there would have been no Supreme Court "intrusion."
A president is elected when he gets a majority of the electoral vote, which Bush did twice. It simply doesn't matter that Gore received more popular votes in 2000, any more than it mattered that Clinton was elected twice but never received as much as 50% of the popular vote.
This is false. See here.
This is also false. The Bush campaign filed the first lawsuit (there ended up being about 35 or so, depending on how you count them).
One thing was clear, the Florida Supreme Court was going to keep working until it could find a way to hand Gore the election. The Florida legislature, however, was poised to step in and make the Florida Supreme Court's blatant disregard of law and facts irrelevent. There was no way that Gore was going to win Florida, after the vote was taken, and I don't recall any manner of recounting the ballots that put Gore ahead.
The only recounts that would consider Gore as the winner require assigning the 'overvotes' (votes where two or more candidates are selected for president) to Gore. Florida election law states that that is not how overvotes are handled.
The problem with overvotes is the many-times-mentioned problem of 'divining the intent of the voter.' If there are two votes for President on a ballot, how can you be sure which the voter really intended? The answer is that you can't. An overvote has to be discarded.
"However, I doubt that the actual speech WILL BE interesting. Rather, he'll repeat the same old warmed over conservative BS about following the law and not making it."
Actually, the one time I saw him speak in person (at one of the D.C. President's Dinners - long story), I was actually (very) surprised at the depth with which he spoke and his willingness to take brave stands, at times against the sense of the room.
Of course he was just reading Gerson's words, and his stands were all merely warmed over libertarian BS, so you can still
clingstick to your guns and religion, Dilan.Correction: There were many overvotes where you could divine the intent of the voter. These were optical scan ballots where a voter both filled in the bubble for, say, GWB, and also wrote on it "BUSH." The machine reader counted this as an overvote and threw it out because there was too many markings on it, but a human inspector could clearly and uncontroversially determine that such a ballot was cast for Bush alone. Sixteen counties in Florida used optical scan ballots.
I'm not the one with the burden of proof here. Nor do I see anything wrong with the Wiki page, which is accurate. Nevertheless, here's the key language from the CNN page:
"Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide.
The news media consortium then tested a number of other hypothetical scenarios.
Use of Palm Beach County standard
Out of Palm Beach County emerged one of the least restrictive standards for determining a valid punch-card ballot. The county elections board determined that a chad hanging by up to two corners was valid and that a dimple or a chad detached in only one corner could also count if there were similar marks in other races on the same ballot. If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore.
Inclusion of overvotes
In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes."
That is, Wikipedia is a wiki. All wikis are not Wikipedia. When you say "the wiki," we don't know which wiki you're talking about. When you say "the Wiki," we think you've made an error of typography or logic.
Given the context and common usage, you might think I made an abbreviation or used a shorthand expression.
I'm a big fan of pedantry, but up with this I will not put.
I've heard the guy speak many times over the course of at least 10 years, David. Irrespective of my policy differences, I can myself remember times when I thought he did a nice job-- in the debate against Gore is one time, and many times on the subjects of immigration and education, subject areas in which he had a genuine intellectual interest.
I have never heard him say anything about the subject of the legal system that goes beyond a talk radio soundbyte, however.
I should have been more specific. It was Gore, not Bush, who sought the relief in the courts that culminated in the Supreme Court's Dec. 12, 2000, opinion stopping the recount (you know, the one in which, according to the Democrat partisans, the Court "gave" the election to Bush). The so-called constitutional crisis could have been avoided altogether had Gore simply had the class to do what Nixon did in 1960 and accept the loss.
That's pretty much a tautology (how'm I doin', Pedant?). If there were no disagreement, there'd be no crisis. It could equally well be said that there'd have been no crisis if Bush had agreed to the recount. Which, if he had done so as Gore requested, he would have won.
"I have never heard him say anything about the subject of the legal system that goes beyond a talk radio soundbyte, however."
As a non-lawyer and given my small sample size, I'll grant that this is not unlikely. His nomination of Miers suggests that it actually likely. The law has never been his strong suit - hence perhaps his evident enthusiasm for evangelical Christianity, and your (not unjustified) distaste.
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