The nine high court justices heard arguments on the appeal by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush of last month's ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. On November 21 the Florida court ordered state election authorities to allow manual recounts of presidential ballots and include the results of the recounts in the official tally. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore is seeking recounts in several south Florida counties, in accord with state election laws, because the official margin for Bush is only 537 votes and thousands of presidential votes did not register in the initial machine tabulation and have never been counted. The fundamental issue before the US Supreme Court is the right of citizens to vote and have their vote counted. Should the high court side with Bush, it will officially sanction the imposition of a president by anti-democratic means.
Most commentators expect the court to issue a ruling within the next several days.
But whatever the outcome, the hearing itself has already revealed that the most right-wing faction on the court is hostile to the very notion of popular sovereignty and democratic rule. In the course of the exchanges between the justices and the lawyers on both sides, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who, together with Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, comprise the extreme right wing on the court, advanced the argument that the Florida high court had no right to override the decisions of the state election authorities. They did so on the grounds that there is no provision in the US Constitution for the people in each state to choose, through a popular vote, the presidential electors. Instead, they argued, it is the prerogative of the state legislatures to choose the electors from each state by any means they see fit. Rehnquist and Scalia asserted that the Florida high court, by basing its decision on the right of the people of Florida to vote for the president, was infringing on the prerogative of the state legislature as laid down in Article II of the federal Constitution.