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Dubya did nothing to be elected president, in fact he wasn't elected, he was selected.
Nope - "elected" is the correct word. It was a tie vote and it was played out according to the rules. Federal law requires that the vote be counted _using rules that were in place when the vote was cast_. That's to prevent tampering in just such a case as this. The Florida courts can't change the rules for a federal election after it is held.
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Dubya did nothing to be elected president, in fact he wasn't elected, he was selected.
W. had been CEO of a couple of oil companies and was governor of Texas for eight years.
Moreover he was a _successful_ governor. It's not as though he flopped there and was elected President anyway. And his signature program was as a negotiated result of bipartisan compromise(!).
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Truman is often talked about as deserving war crimes indictments for dropping atomic bombs on Japan.
Nope - both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were carefully chosen to be legitimate military targets with respect to planned military operations (the invasion of mainland Japan). Hiroshima was basically an Army Group base; I forget offhand what installations were in Nagasaki.
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Don't forget the fact that Dubya joined a small community of Presidents that lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote. The electoral vote is an archaic, out of date concept that does not have any real reason to still exist.
Bush's election was waaaay inside the margin of error. A series of national recounts would have had random results, one Gore, the next Bush. Monte Carlo simulations suggest Bush really did win in the Electoral college, but only with a 55%-60% confidence - in other words, a tie vote no matter how you look at it.
Bill Clinton is a much stranger case. His first election was *far* worse than either of Bush jr's, and in fact Clinton's first was a landslide Republican vote ... but there were two Republicans running. Clinton won his second with less than 50% too.
(there's a warning for Republican there - after Carter in 76 it took the Democrats *32 years* until Obama managed to win an election cleanly with more than half the votes cast and beyond the margin of error)
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My short answer for now is that I doubt that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment and its equal protection clause intended it to be used to usurp the authority of state courts in an election dispute
State courts don't have "final authority" in any election and haven't since the 1960's. And changing the counting rules after the voting starts has been forbidden longer than that.
I admit that's the a strangely-worded SCOTUS decision, but it's probably the only one ever written in 24 hrs and not over a period of months. They probably had to do all of the writing themselves rather than have clerks do the early drafts.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock
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