As we approach the quarter-century mark of the newish millennium without getting stuck on how quickly it seems to have gone, it’s instructive to glance back at the beginning, when fabricated conservative rage and a malleable enough Supreme Court gave us George Bush and Dick Cheney, irrevocably altering the course of history, haunting us until now as threats of a similar scenario grow more likely with each passing day.
While it’s pure speculation who could have, should have, would have won, by ending the Florida recount and handing the presidency to Bush, the Supreme Court ensured the outcome would remain controversial, damaging the high court’s legitimacy well into the 21st century. And with the current version of SCOTUS, it’s painfully apparent that any notion of integrity has taken a back seat to politics; judicial humility has given way to appalling arrogance; and the conservative majority is already well on its way to transforming the country into the heavily armed Christian theocracy evangelicals have lusted over for decades.
Although it was clear that Al Gore had won the national popular vote, Florida, with its 25 electoral votes, remained undecided for more than a month with myriad problems in the state’s voting system — remember hanging chads? — exponentially adding to the confusion. One factor in the eventual decision to halt the recount was thought to be what would later be called the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” a staged protest by out-of-state, GOP operatives in tweed jackets and button-down shirts designed to look like a grass-roots uprising.
Years later, according to the Washington Post, MAGA toady Roger Stone claimed to have “run” the operation from a Winnebago parked adjacent to the election office: “I set up my command center there … I had walkie-talkies and cellphones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. The whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there.” As with most things Stone says, there was ample pushback from Republicans familiar with the goings-on in Miami nearly a generation ago, several of whom also claimed responsibility for orchestrating the effort.
Whether it was instrumental in the SCOTUS decision remains debatable, but enough conservatives believed it was to create the smoke-and-mirrors dictating Republican politics since then with exaggerations, insinuations and outright lies forming the cornerstone of the GOP philosophy, beginning with two tragedies. Bush v. Gore was bookended by two catastrophic events — the Columbine school shooting in 1999 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 — whose aftermath illustrates how some of the party’s favorite lies, based on politics and money, continue to make the country and the world more dangerous each day.
While the Columbine massacre offered an opportunity to address the proliferation of firearms, Republicans squandered it, with guidance from the National Rifle Association, instead going the mythology route, creating an enduring and unapologetic message that, for over two decades, has provided complicit smokescreens in the wake of dozens of mass shootings.
NPR reports that after 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech in 2007, the NRA/Republican response was: “This is the time for people to grieve, to mourn and to heal. This is not a time for political discussions or public policy debate.” After 2012’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we had: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” And in Parkland, Florida, after the 2018 high school bloodbath, there it was blame the media as an NRA spokesman suggested “Many in the legacy media love mass shootings.”
The result of all this dissembling is in excess of 400 million guns in the United States, more mass shootings than days thus far in 2023 and firearm deaths approaching 50,000 in an average year. The disgusting irony of all this death is that the arms industry profits handsomely with each mass shooting with guns flying off shelves at the unlikely prospect of Congress passing sane legislation.
It’s still difficult to comprehend the blatant fabrications leading up to our invasion and occupation of Iraq, falsely accused by Bush/Cheney of having an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction directly threatening the United States with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein affiliated with al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks, none of which was remotely true. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and 4,000 American soldiers needlessly died in the conflict, destabilizing the region, giving rise to ISIS — generally considered one of the worst strategic blunders of all time.
Make no mistake, the Republican Party and its 25-year culture of deception is wholly responsible for the state of the country at this point, convincingly argued by Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank in his 2022 book “The Destructionists,” referring to the party as “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
As this tumultuous year draws to a close, a flip of the calendar reveals an even more perilous 2024 with the fate of the country and democracy quite possibly resting on the outcome of November’s presidential election, which we already know Republicans will challenge unless their candidate wins — if he can stay out of jail. The trick for the coalition of the sane will be to defeat the GOP convincingly enough to keep the Supreme Court too far away to influence the results.
Should we find ourselves at risk of being too complacent, we should keep in mind that three SCOTUS justices are no strangers to judicial activism. Chief Justice John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Cony Barrett all worked toward ensuring George Bush was able to take that victory lap in Miami.
Walt Amses lives in North Calais.
