Schadenfreude is A Dish Best Served On The Op-Ed Page of the Wall Street Journal.

Ted Olson is having a lot of fun today looking into a future where the Democratic party may need to undo the decision it made to disenfranchise the entire state of Florida in a fit of pique. He says that if it comes down to it, we’ll see one heck of a show in the courts.

The array of battle-tested Democratic lawyers who fought for recounts, changes in ballot counting procedures, and even re-votes in Florida courts and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 would separate into two camps. Half of them would be relying on the suddenly-respectable Supreme Court Bush v. Gore decision that overturned the Florida courts’ post-hoc election rules changes. The other half would be preaching a new-found respect for “federalism” and demanding that the high court leave the Florida court decisions alone.

Would the U.S. Supreme Court even take the case after having been excoriated for years by liberals for daring to restore order in the Florida vote-counting in 2000? And, would Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, the dissenters in Bush v. Gore, feel as strongly about not intervening if Sen. Obama was fighting against an effort to change a presidential election by changing the rules after the fact? Will there be a brief filed by Floridians who didn’t vote in their state’s primary because the party had decided, and the candidates had agreed, that the results wouldn’t count?

In short, the way things are going so far, Sens. Obama and Clinton will probably be so close to one another in delegate count by the time of the convention that all those primary votes may be tabulated, but will turn out to be irrelevant to the outcome. Those 796 superdelegate politicians will decide who the candidate will be. Maybe no cigar or cigarette smoke this time, but back-room politics all the same. All those primary voters and millions in campaign expenses locked out of the room.

This may be one of those déjà vu fantasies that won’t happen. But it did happen before. And Florida has a quirky habit of popping up again and again in close presidential elections, having been a factor not only in 2000, but also the epic presidential election controversy of 1876. And Democratic lawyers have undoubtedly kept copies of the legal briefs they filed for Al Gore in 2000 into which their computers can easily substitute the name Clinton for Gore.

If it does happen, I’d be more than happy to loan Sen. Obama the winning briefs that helped secure the election of the legitimate winner of the 2000 election, George W. Bush.

It’s kind of a shame that the best we knuckeheaded conservatives could come up with this election was John McCain. I bet that more than a few folks are regretting not backing a more conservative candidate and are re-evaluating a few really stupid and un-conservative memes they were spreading. If they aren’t, they should be. After the Democrats have their Convention of the Long Knives they’re not likely to be this confused and hapless in the next few elections. We will not have a better chance to bury their silliness under mountains of reason and truth for a long time.

(via memeorandum)

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Category: The 2008 Horse Race