Just to clear up a point...

I wouldn’t normally post something like this on the blog proper, it’s really more the sort of thing I’d do in a comment, but I’m going to break that rule just this once. Something I said, but didn’t say all that well, requires clarification.

In last night’s post (Don’t count your chickens before you scramble the eggs) I talked about the consequences if the election comes down to another close decision based (at least theoretically) on the Constitution. Part of what I said was:

"This, of course, would set up a bigger firestorm than we had with the old who-won-Florida debacle eight years ago. Remember? Remember not knowing who won the election until weeks after the election? Remember the Supreme Court stepping in and deciding the election for us, despite the fact that they had no constitutional authority to do so or that the electoral procedures in place hadn’t even been fully utilized? I certainly remember. And I dread the same thing happening again. Could the U.S. face another such without domestic violence breaking out? I don’t know...but I doubt it."

It has been brought to my attention that it might have sounded like I was saying that a close decision between Obama and McCain, made on strictly constitutional grounds, would be a bad thing. Well, I was...and I wasn’t.

What I wasn’t saying was that a constitutional decision would be, in and of itself, in any way illegal. Nor was I saying that such a decision, made on constitutional grounds, would in any way be unconstitutional.

What I was saying was a warning against a repeat of 2000, when the Constitution was sidestepped and a President was selected for us, a President who possibly (I say possibly because the constitutional process was subverted and we'll never really know) didn't actually win either the popular vote or the Eclectoral college. Selected by the Supreme Court, which had been asked to step in by GWB and which it had neither precedent nor authority to do.

(Bit of a history lesson here.) Here’s an uncritical breakdown of the Supreme Court’s decision from 2000. Briefly, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a manual recount of contested ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court, defying law and precedent, said that the recount was inherently unfair and stopped it. I happen to agree with the minority opinion of Justices Stevens and Ginsberg; that the Florida court’s decision was fundamentally correct and should have been respected. But who am I to say? Just one of the rare people who actually reads such things...

You know, I hadn’t wanted to get into all of that Supreme Court rehash, but here I am rehashing it all. But I think it’s important that you understand where I’m coming from, the half-dozen of you actually reading this, lest you judge me just another whacko who can’t let go of the past. But it’s all irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.

That point is this: that the very last thing that this country needs right now is another closely contested call, with a minority President (legally or not) presiding over a bitterly divided nation. Perhaps there’s no way to avoid the "bitterly divided" part, but I feel that without at least a majority of public support that no candidate has a hope of healing that particular wound. That is what I was warning against, what I’m still warning against, and I fear another such.

Look, I know that I’m just one guy writing a blog that hardly anyone reads. I know that my opinion doesn’t amount to much. That does not mean that I’m not going to express it. So this is me, expressing it.

Oh, and one last thing...I just want to be sure that you got this point from the previous post:

"Get this straight: I am not advocating domestic violence in any form, and I don’t think it would benefit anyone. If it happens it would be the darkest day in U.S. history thus far."

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.