ARREST THE FLORIDA JUDGES!! Jude Wanniski November 27, 2000

Memo To: Attorney General Janet Reno
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Grand Larceny in Tallahassee!!!

We’ve heard a lot of hot-under-the-collar rhetoric from partisans on both sides of the presidential campaign. Almost all of it has involved charges that either Vice President Gore or Governor Bush is trying to STEAL the election. Asked if he thinks the Democrats are trying to steal the election, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole thought for a moment and said he did not know whether it was petty larceny or grand larceny. My old supply-side friend, Paul Craig Roberts, does not pussyfoot, Madame Attorney General. He agrees with Governor Bush that the seven Democrats changed Florida law by judicial fiat in ordering the Secretary of State to not certify a winner in the race by the date prescribed by the law and to allow several Democratic counties to recount by hand votes already recounted by machine. Mr. Roberts, who served as an Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan administration, believes the court acted in criminal fashion. I bring this to your attention because the U.S. Supreme Court will consider this issue on Friday of this week. If it decides the Florida judges did try to steal the election, I think Mr. Roberts wants you to send federal marshals to Florida to throw those judges in the clink. Here is what he had to say in his LewRockwell.com column today:

Enabling Act for the Judiciary?
By Paul Craig Roberts

The corrupt Florida Supreme Court must be severely punished for participating in vote fraud. Impeachment is too good for the Gang of Seven. Arrest, indictment and trial are the best response to the court's criminal behavior. Republicans must not acquiescence to the Democrats misuse of judicial office to steal an election.

Florida is a state where Republicans have been overwhelmingly elected to legislative and executive office. Yet, the Democratic, partisan and corrupt state Supreme Court has clearly overstepped its authority in an effort to help Democrats revote ballots to Gore's benefit. Why would seven jurists so audaciously and confidently participate in vote fraud, an illegal act, in a state where Republicans hold the balance of power?

The answer is that for almost a half century ever since the 1954 Brown decision of the U.S. Supreme Court the judiciary has been gradually appropriating the legislative role, adding the power of lawmaker to its assigned role of law interpreter.

Unlike the Florida Supreme Court's brazen decision to assist the Democrats in stealing a presidential election, the Brown v. Board of Education decision was in behalf of a noble cause desegregation of public schools.

The Brown decision remains sullied by the means through which it was obtained an unethical ex parte collaboration between a sitting justice, Felix Frankfurter, and a litigant, Justice Department official Philip Elman. The plot achieved its goal of abolishing segregation, but the means usurped legislative authority and created a precedent inimical to democracy. The judiciary learned that whenever it can claim the moral high ground, it can legislate.

Other factors have contributed to the judiciary's rising power. The larger government grew, the more involved "special interests" became in politics in order to defend and advance their interests. In the public's mind, campaign contributions and interest group politics gradually undermined the authority of the legislative branch. A tainted and sometimes stalemated legislature permitted the judiciary to make inroads into the legislative arena.

With legislatures seen as agents of special interests, the judiciary has successfully ignored the constitutional separation of powers and appropriated more and more power. The Florida Supreme Court now has claimed the power to void statutory election laws when its candidate loses.

The Florida vote count will not be over, the court declared, until highly partisan Democratic vote counters in a few heavily Democratic Florida counties revote enough ballots to change the election outcome. By aiding and abetting vote fraud, the court has violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The votes of a relatively few people in a few Florida counties are being counted according to different rules from the votes of everyone else in the state and the country.

The Florida justices clearly do not expect the legislature to do anything about the vote fraud that the court is foisting upon the country. Rule by judges has become a habit. The Florida Supreme Court is relying on the legislative habit of deferring to judges.

If the Republican Party permits this extraordinary abuse of office by the Florida Supreme Court, Republicans will have signed an American version of the Enabling Act, which in 1933 transferred legislative power from the German parliament to Adolf Hitler, thus making him a dictator. Instead of signing over power to one person, the Republicans will have transferred it to the judiciary.

Elected representatives will have a difficult time reclaiming their authority from judges. After 46 years the judiciary can claim squatters rights to supreme power. Hitler faced more constraints than our judiciary, which proceeds without an Enabling Act. The people's will is being stolen behind Democratic profusions of "the intent of the people." No longer effected by elected representatives, the people's will is to be discerned by courts second-guessing voters intentions in the voting booth.

Massive Democratic vote fraud has made this election a close one. Having sized up Republicans as cowardly and timid, Democrats decided that they could steal the election behind a barrage of lies and propaganda laid down by their faithful allies at CNN and the TV networks. These Nazi-style propaganda machines are playing a decisive role in the destruction of American constitutional democracy.

If Republicans can t muster more courage than the Reichstag could find in 1933, the stolen election of 2000 will put an end to representative democracy in the United States.