Word: splitting
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Saturday afternoon, the recount was under way in Florida, with a strong chance that by day's end Gore might pick up enough votes to move ahead of Bush for the first time. Then the U.S. Supreme Court joined the battle. In another acrimonious split decision--this one 5 to 4--the Justices halted the recount and scheduled oral arguments for Monday on George W. Bush's claim that the manual counts are unconstitutional and could do "irreparable harm" to his candidacy. Al Gore's top lawyer, David Boies, was eating lunch with another hotshot lawyer, Stephen Zack, when...
Americans like to think of the third branch of government--especially the highest court in the land--as a bastion against the surgical divide in the country. The voters couldn't decide between Bush and Gore, and Congress is split between Republicans and Democrats, but as we groped for a solution to the election mess, we couldn't help looking to the courts for a wisdom that rises above the nation's two angry political camps...
...seemed clear at oral argument in the first round that the Justices were split on partisan grounds. "The most worrisome thing," says University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, "was that the conservatives just gave Gore's lawyer a hard time, and vice versa." And the curt order the court issued Saturday showed the rift is still there. The dissenters issued a stern rebuke to the majority. By stopping the recount, Justice Stevens wrote for all four dissenters, the majority was abandoning its "venerable rules," including the well-established principle of deferring to state courts on questions of state...
...told Murkowski to send him a memo.) Strom Thurmond, who turned 98 that day, danced a little jig to demonstrate that he had no intention of going anywhere. Both sides were focused on the power-sharing issues that sprang from the 50-50 tie in the Senate--an even split that assumed, of course, that Bush would defeat Gore, keeping Lieberman in the Senate as the 50th Democratic vote, with Cheney the Republican tie breaker. The even split gave moderates hope that they alone would hold the key to the President's legislative success. At times last week, it seemed...
There were deep divisions as well in the Florida Supreme Court's own ranks. It is Jurisprudence 101 that when a court delivers a bombshell decision, the judges struggle to be unanimous. But the Florida court split 4-3, and the rift was a bitter one. Attached to the court's ruling was a dissent from the Chief Justice warning that the majority risked sending the nation into "an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional crisis"--a powerful built-in sound bite for critics waiting to tear the majority decision apart...