Why the Fla. Supremes Will Likely Vote For Bush

That is why the Florida Supreme Court most likely will not use its incredible power to determine the next president of the United States by labeling "arbitary" the discretion of Secretary of State Katherine Harris in certifying the vote. These jurists want to preserve their monarchical power to use another day, in far less visible but just as damaging ways.

These seven robed "arbiters for life" sitting on the state's highest court, all of them picked by Democrat governors, are Exhibit A in the argument made by Gov. George W. Bush during this campaign that "judicial activism" imperils our freedoms. He would appoint "strict constructionists" to the federal judiciary, he says, including to the U.S. Supreme Court. They would be the types of judges that would not even think about overturning presidential elections. He may have a tough time finding any.

Ever since the 200-year-old U.S. Supreme Court case of Marbury vs. Madison, the federal judiciary has revered as dogma the tenet that only the judicial branch of government can determine whether a law is constitutional.

This is hogwash, but it is widely accepted hogwash, especially so among lawyers, who are to the left of normal people, with most judges to the left of them. "Left" in this, as in almost every other context, means infatuated with the idea that government knows better than the people by what laws they wish to be governed.

The Florida Supreme Court is made up of intelligent, albeit ideological, beings who surely know that the quickest way to give voice and strength to those who want to rein in the judiciary is to void a presidential election.

Do that, they fear, and their self-appointed supremacy among the three branches of government will be under attack. They will turn one of the two major parties into the "strict construction party," and it will move on its new animating agenda with a religious fervor. Do that, and their robes will then be lifted by half the populace, revealing the judges, like emperors, have no clothes.

My guess, then, is that the seven persons presently empowered to literally pick the president, as if they were an unelected Electoral College, will not do so.

They will not go out on that limb, content rather to hack away with silent chainsaws at whatever is left of the once mighty oak we call the Constitution.