Did she move and change her name, or what?

Somehow, on a previous post, we got onto a tangent about persistent Democratic claims that Al  Gore actually won the 2000 election, which he didn’t, as media recounts after the court case demonstrated.

Anyway, in trying to find that link above, I went to Wikipedia, and ran across the name of Katherine Harris, and suddenly pictured her in my mind, and thought, Hey, wait a minute…

I’ve been thinking since she emerged on the scene that Michele Bachmann looked familiar, like someone I hadn’t seen since…

And now the mystery is solved. For me, anyway.

What do you think?

11 thoughts on “Did she move and change her name, or what?”

  2. Phillip

    While you are correct to say that one cannot say that “Al Gore won the 2000 election,” one could also say it is not certain that George W. Bush won the election either. The media recounts to which you refer were very informative: they were not legally binding, because unfortunately the SCOTUS ensured that we would never actually know for sure who really won the election, by stopping the full recount in progress.

    As Alan Dershowitz put it, ” The decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath.”

  4. Brad

    Yeah, Phillip, except that I believe the opposite of the scurrilous things that Dershowitz said about the court.

    That’s a statement that arises from emotion — something that grips everyone from time to time — instead of his own understanding of the law.

  5. Mark Stewart

    I’m glad Phillip brought up the Supreme Court so I can address that instead of bringing up beer goggles.

    While I firmly believe that the Court has been divided on some cases due to baser political instincts and paybacks, the Supreme Court in 2000 was on the historical stage to wrestle with exactly the type of question for which the Court was concieved under the Constitution. That’s not a situation where anyone – members of Congress excepted – would stand and commit to any position that they did not feel was in the best interests of the country. The Supreme Court, as with the Presidency, is judged by history. That’s their individual and collective legacy.

  6. Brad Warthen

    Amen to that, Mark. That’s exactly what I believe. Which of those men was elected was of far lesser importance (something partisans find difficult to conceive) than applying the law correctly at such a moment. The court would have felt that burden fully.

  7. Phillip

    Forget Dershowitz, Mark and Brad. As this 2006 Times piece correctly analyzes, the application of the equal protection clause may have been appropriate (though we have yet to see that principle’s implications applied to elections across the country since then) but the remedy at the moment was certainly not. Money quote: “The Supreme Court’s highly partisan resolution of the 2000 election was a severe blow to American democracy, and to the court’s own standing.”

    There’s no question that a heavy, heavy, heavy price was paid by our nation by the way the SCOTUS handled Bush v. Gore…Brad, you’d like to think I think it’s because it resulted in the cowboy and the war criminal being installed in the White House. Wrong. You couldn’t have expressed it any better than you did above: “Which of these men was elected was of far lesser importance than applying the law correctly at such a moment.” Exactly. Because, as you indicate in reference to the media recounts, Bush likely would have won anyway. But imagine if he had done so without the stain of the SCOTUS suspending the recount. History might have been significantly different. I think the erosion of national confidence in our civic institutions, admittedly begun long before that, accelerated drastically with Bush v. Gore. We are where we are today in significant part because of that decision, and there’s no sugarcoating that.

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