"You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency...." W. Somerset Maugham
The rule of law! The will of the people! This past two weeks has proven without doubt that the rule of law means diddly squat to political lawyers who are hell bent on turning our constitutional republic into a "rule by mob" democracy.
This has been the most distasteful political lesson of my life, witnessing the contempt lawyer-politicians have for our system of government.
As you've probably guessed, as I write this essay the presidential so-called election is still up in the air. But since the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to weigh in, and I don't think we can settle for less at this point, there's a good chance it won't be resolved before publication time.
To be within the "rule of law," and Florida election law is as specific as Nevada's election law, if ballots are in any way mistreated and are rejected by vote tabulating machines, they are not valid. That's the way it should be. That's the way it is.
Now, if we want to change the law or eliminate it in favor of rules by fiat, then such a change must take place before an election, not after the fact.
Personally, I think in view of the travesty which has now destroyed the voting system in southern Florida to the point that no outcome can be trusted, a complete hand recount of the entire state is called for. Moreover, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico and Oregon, whose results are also far too close to trust, should be hand counted with tight supervision by equal members of both parties. Disputed ballots should be ruled on by equally balanced bipartisan commissions.
Perhaps some of you are wondering why the Bush people haven't agreed to such a compromise, but it's premature until we see how the lower courts, and by lower courts I include the Florida Supreme Court, will rule. Of course, I predict that any Florida court, or regional appellate federal court for that matter, will come down along party-appointment lines no matter what.
And although I don't like the ideological makeup of our U.S. Supreme Court, I think it's more likely to respect the "rule of law" than are the lower courts.
There are two good lessons to be learned from all of this, the first being that we elect far too many lawyers to the U.S. Congress and Senate. I submit that if the vast majority of our elected legislators presiding in Washington, D.C. were not lawyers, we wouldn't be seeing the courts being forced to play the political games they're playing with respect to this farce of an election.
On television we're inundated with past and present lawyer-politicians all giving their own political interpretive spin on what should be a simple rule of law; that which has gone before and has been respected as such. And the media loves it! The more chaos the better.
The other lesson we Nevadans have already learned, but most states have yet to learn, is that electing judges is far better than appointing them from the standpoint of judicial independence. Several of my legal-beagle buddies always claim that electing judges is the worst way to get the best qualified lawyers on the bench, and that only lawyers should make such judgments. Well, folks, after what I've just witnessed over the past two weeks, I'll trust us, the great unwashed, to elect our judges over anyone appointing them. All seven Florida Supreme Court judges owe their appointments to the Democrat who appointed them! It's now payback time.
In conclusion, I want to emphasize the importance of the Electoral College in our system of electing presidents. I know it's frustrating to see the popular vote going one way and the electoral votes going another, but the wisdom here is the same as the reason every state has two senators. If senators were elected on the basis of population as congressmen are, we small states wouldn't have any representation at all against the big states. In a strictly popular vote situation, a state like California alone could overwhelm the popular votes of small states like Nevada, Montana, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming combined.
Our founding fathers were pretty smart. Even though they originally had only 13 states to contend with, they inherently knew that with the great expanse of our country yet to be colonized, there would be additional states, and those newer states would probably have different interests and objectives. A true democracy, where the majority always rules (popular vote) no matter what, would run rampant over minority state's rights. The Electoral College is a major protector of what little sovereignty our states have left against ever growing federal dominance.
Bob Thomas is a Carson City businessman, local curmudgeon and former member of the Carson City School Board and Nevada State Assembly.