BUSH V. GORE REDUX:

Senate race and Supreme Court: Another Bush v. Gore? (Linda Greenhouse, October 5, 2002 , The NY Times)

The Supreme Court has jurisdiction only over questions arising under the federal constitution and federal statutes. The Republican petition offered the justices a bit of each, including a nod to constitutional due process and to a federal statute on absentee voting. Most creatively, the Republicans borrowed a concept from the three-justice plurality opinion in Bush v. Gore to the effect that a state legislature's word on the conduct of federal elections is final and cannot be supplanted or perhaps even supplemented by the state's courts.

"It's amazing how close" the parallel arguments are, said Richard Hasen, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "It shows that Bush v. Gore can rear its head in lots of ways that we can't anticipate. It's out there for everyone to use for their different purposes."

It seems here, as it did in the Florida case, that the Supreme Court has a particular obligation to police the Judiciary to make sure it does not meddle in Federal elections where it truly has no role other than to apply the law, which the NJ Supreme Court obviously did not do. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 4, 2002 10:47 PM