Today's Op-Eds on Elections and the Supreme Court

There’s two must read op-eds today. Paul Krugman looks back at the 2000 election, noting that Katherine Harris’s planned runn for the Senate will stir up these memories. He cites a recent book which looked at the election:

In his recent book “Steal This Vote” - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I’ve seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: “Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election.”

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris’s “felon purge,” which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

Senator Kennedy wrote about the importance of reviewing Roberts’ views in the Washington Post. He reviews previous statements from Roberts and points out that, “If Roberts continues to hold the views he appears to have expressed in the early 1980s, then his views on civil rights are out of the mainstream, and the people have the right to know that.” Kennedy concludes with:

No one has an automatic right to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court. A nominee to the high court must first demonstrate that he has a core commitment to constitutional rights and liberties. He must show that he is in the mainstream of modern judicial thought and that he would not use an ideologically motivated interpretation of our Constitution or laws to reverse the hard-fought gains we have made to make this nation more just. Judge Roberts’s early record raises serious questions about his commitment to core constitutional values, and the Senate must have the requested information to fully and faithfully execute its constitutional obligation.