Continuing unofficial counts reveal the full extent of Al Gore's lead and
 the massive abuses that have put George W. Bush into power

 http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,415283,00.html

 Will Hutton
 Sunday December 24, 2000

 I never thought I would live to see it. There has been a right-wing coup in the United
 States. It is now clear beyond any doubt that the winner of the Presidential election
 was Al Gore. In Florida the votes are being counted unofficially in a way the
 Supreme Court would not permit: he was already 140 votes ahead when counting
 stopped for Christmas and his final lead promises to be in the thousands.
 Nationally he leads by over half a million votes. What has happened is beyond
 outrage. It is the cynical misuse of power by a conservative élite nakedly to serve its
 interests - and all of us should be frightened for the consequences.

 The issue is not George W. Bush's conservatism, opponent though I am of what Bush
 plans to do; a democracy only has vitality and political tension if its philosophy and stream
 of thinking is articulated and pitches to win elections.

 The incontrovertible abuse is that Bush has won power despite losing, and critically he
 only pulled off this feat because the Republicans control the Supreme Court. The Right
 has subverted pivotal US institutions to win power - a campaign of which the discrediting
 and attempted impeachment of Clinton was part - and in the process disgraced the
 legitimacy of US democracy at home and abroad, and undermined conceptions of the
 ule of law. It is a poor augury for the twenty-first century.

 In Britain the response has been woeful - itself a token of our own lack of hard
 democratic instincts. The commentary, especially in the right-of-centre press, has
 been to decry Gore as a poor loser and to insist that he had to accept the rules of
 the electoral game, respecting the votes in the US electoral college which, when
 Florida was lost, gave Bush the election. But as the great liberal defenders of freedom,
 Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, both argued when unjust, illegitimate governments win
 power through subverting the rules it is our responsibility to contest them.

 The nine-member Supreme Court, apart from the heady decade of the 1960s when
 it advanced the cause of civil rights in the South, has always been a bastion of a
 regressive conservatism. In the 1930s it tried to rule that key elements in Roosevelt's
 New Deal were unconstitutional. Its defence of the sovereignty of states rights has been
 fundamental in extending capital punishment and allowing bible-belt states to resist
 implementing federal legislation banning violence against women. Yet its general
 prohibition in interfering in a state's rights has been overturned in one instance;
 the highly politicised intervention in Florida.

 The more you examine it, the more outrageous the now famous judgement was.
 What the Court had to do to serve its political purpose was to find a way of
 acknowledging a sovereign state's rights and the continuing legitimacy of hand
 recounts in closely contested elections - after all George W. Bush had passed a
 law as Governor in Texas in 1998 endorsing hand recounts - but at the same time
 give the election to their Republican champion by finding that events in Florida were
 a special case.

 This was tricky.

 In the first place, even the conservative judges shared the unanimous view that it was
 reasonable for hand recounts to be undertaken because, as the judgment concedes:
 'Punch card  balloting machines can produce an unfortunate number of ballots which
 are not punched in a clean, complete way by the voter.' Consequently individual states
 are obliged, when the winning margin is tight, to mount an effort to find out what
 the 'clear intent' of each voter was. In other words Gore was completely within
 his rights to demand the hand recount.

 The five conservatives had a problem. How could they deliver the coup? The solution
 was elegant. The process was too subjective, said the Supreme Court,
 unless the Florida court put in place even more protective measures to ensure
 impartiality than the Florida legislature had provided for - a position that is
 constitutionally impossible, as the judges knew, because it meant the Court would
 have to change rather than interpret Florida law. Hand recounts are thus legal
 in principle but impossible in practice because of possible partiality. And in a
 telling aside in its judgment, the Court said that hand recounts would 'cast a
 cloud' over Bush's 'legitimacy' that would harm 'democratic stability'. It never
 crossed the five-strong conservative majority's mind that the opposite might be
 the case; that not counting votes which would give Gore the presidency when
 nationally he had won half a million more votes than Bush would damage, not
 democratic stability, but the entire democratic principle.

 But then right-wing America is not much interested in the democratic principle. It
 believes that its duty is to sustain America in its unique destiny as a
 Christian guardian of individual liberty, a place - I joke not - that will deserve
 Christ's second coming. It sees itself in a holy war against a liberal enemy within,
 and its uses every tool at its disposal ruthlessly to dispose of its foe.

 The Right enjoyed 12 years of power under Reagan and Bush, lost the
 Presidency to Clinton in 1992 when Ross Perot split the conservative vote and
 pledged to continue their jihad against what they saw as his illegitimate victory
 from the beginning. Hence the fantasies of Whitewater. Hence the Starr inquiry into
 the Lewinsky affair, where now we learn key evidence was fabricated. Hence the
 attempted impeachment. Mud sticks, they reckoned, and even though they
 knew impeachment would fail, they calculated it would put any Democrat
 presidential candidate in 2000 in a presentational bind - association with the
 successful Clinton years would be attacked as an association with immorality.

 But for all their efforts American public opinion remained stubbornly tolerant,
 sceptical of tax cuts and moderately centrist. To win Bush had to outspend his rival
 two to one in the last month and build on the strategic dilemma faced by Gore about
 the Clinton years. But even then it has taken the Supreme Court to complete the coup.

 For all the talk of reconciliation Bush is building a tribal conservative
 administration bent on supporting business at home and asserting US
 unilateralism abroad. His next Treasury Secretary has been picked not for his
 capacity to negotiate the US and the world through the minefield of a fragile
 international financial system, but his interest in feathering the nests of
 corporate America. And so it goes on, offering the US and the world a policy and
 perspective not wanted by the majority of Americans.

 The consensus view is that within months the whole Florida affair will be forgotten,
 and Bush will be installed as a legitimate US President. I don't agree. The value of
 democracies is they produce administrations broadly in tune with the times and will
 of the people, and thus able to marshal both consent and the correct
 policy responses for the varying crises that hit them.

 Not so in America. Whether the need to respect international treaties abroad or the
 desire to universalise medical protection at home, the US has the man in power it
 did not want and whose instincts are opposite to those of the majority. This will
 prove a disastrous administration for America and the world, and the coup will
 become widely understood as a moment of partisan infamy. It is a brutal lesson
 for us liberals. Never, never forget the treachery and poison on the Right.