Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (90 page)

West Virginia
Another state won easily by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, West Virginia gave Bush five electoral votes by a margin of some 40,000 votes. One key to the Bush win there was the lavish campaign spending by the coal industry, one of the chief beneficiaries of President Bush’s environmental policies. These included new rules that removed restrictions from “mountaintop removal,” a form of coal mining in which entire tops of mountains were sheared off to mine coal. This technique, which created vast amounts of earth and rock, and had them dumped into rivers and streams, had been prohibited under previous Environmental Protection Agency rules.

Ohio
Of the states won by Clinton in 1992 and 1996 that Gore could not hold in 2000, the largest Electoral College vote lay here with twenty-one electoral votes. Once considered a solid Democratic stronghold with a powerful union vote, Ohio went to Bush. (Although Nader took more than 100,000 votes in Ohio, his candidacy was a smaller factor there than elsewhere.)

New Hampshire
The closest race of all was in this small New England state with its four electoral votes. Had they gone to Gore, he would have won the election. The only New England (and northeastern) state carried by George Bush, New Hampshire had been carried by Bill Clinton in both 1992 and 1996. But in 2000, Bush won the “Live Free or Die” state by 7,211 votes, out of some 600,000 presidential votes cast. Here the Green Party’s Ralph Nader may have played the most crucial spoiler role in this independent-minded and often quirky state. Nader won more than 22,000 votes, presumably drawing from liberal and reform-minded voters who might have otherwise voted in the Democratic camp.

Much of the commentary in this extraordinary and bizarre election also focused on the unprecedented role of the Supreme Court. Had the Rehnquist Court, which often divided between five conservative justices (William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy) and four more liberal justices (Stephen Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John Paul Stevens), acted properly in its decision? Or had the Court overreached its legitimate bounds in essentially deciding the election? The answer to that question, predictably, seemed to depend on the political preference of the person who answered. At one end of the spectrum were those who found the Court’s opinion perfectly acceptable, usually Republican Bush supporters. One constant in their view: the Supreme Court had to overturn a flawed and politically biased ruling made by the Democratic majority in the Florida State Supreme Court—even if that flew in the recent tradition of the Republican Party’s devotion to states’ rights. That was the view expressed by one Republican legal scholar who argued that the decision was poorly reasoned and badly written but, in the end, fundamentally the correct one.

In the highly partisan postdecision atmosphere, it was difficult to find a conservative voice that disagreed with the Supreme Court. But, writing in the
Weekly Standard
(December 25, 2000), John J. DiIulio Jr. was one of the few who did: “To any conservative who truly respects federalism, the majority’s opinion is hard to respect. . . . The arguments that ended the battle and ‘gave’ Bush the presidency are constitutionally disingenuous at best. They will come back to haunt conservatives and confuse, if they do not cripple, the principled conservative case for limited government, legislative supremacy, and universal civic deference to legitimate, duly constituted state and local public authority.” He concluded, “There was a time when conservatives would rather have lost a close, hotly contested presidential election, even against a person and a party from whom many feared the worst, than ad-
vance judicial imperialism, diminish respect for federalism, or pander to mass misunderstanding and mistrust of duly elected legislative officials. . . . Desirable result aside, it is bad constitutional law.”

On the other end of the spectrum were those—generally Democrats and Gore supporters—who thought the decision a judicial outrage. Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz called it the “single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history.” It was difficult to find a Gore supporter who thought that the Court had done the right thing. Perhaps the most outraged was famed attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who argued, in a best-selling book called
The Betrayal of America
, that the majority was not only mistaken, but actually criminal. “Considering the criminal intention behind the decision, legal scholars and historians should place this ruling above the Dred Scott case (
Scott v. Sandford
) and
Plessy v. Ferguson
in egregious sins of the Court. The right of every American to have his or her vote counted, and for Americans (not five unelected Justices) to choose their President was callously and I say criminally jettisoned by the Court’s majority to further its own political ideology.”

Bugliosi’s sense of outrage seemed not to be shared by most Americans—and it should be noted that close to half of all eligible Americans did not vote to begin with—who were apparently relieved that the Supreme Court had put the country out of its electoral misery. The prevailing attitude seemed to be any decision was better than no decision and the endless bickering between lawyers in Florida.

For weeks and months after the election, the close votes, the political stratagems of the two candidates, and the Supreme Court’s behavior were debated and deliberated. But the real scandal of the election came in discovering how many votes routinely don’t count in American elections because of voting machine problems and other Election Day irregularities. In most elections, these uncounted votes rarely affected the outcome, so the media did not pay much attention to uncounted votes and “double counted” or “overvotes” that were rejected in the official tally. But in 2000, when every vote truly became precious, Americans learned how disposable their votes actually could be. And it should come as no surprise to learn that most of the votes that never get counted come largely from the poorest districts, often with large minority populations, where the least money is traditionally spent to modernize election machines and ensure that every vote, supposedly considered an American’s most precious birthright, is counted.

This disintegration of millions of votes, coupled with the fact that the popular vote had been upstaged by the Electoral College—that nineteenth-century vestige of a fear of too much democracy—at least briefly rekindled the call to be rid of the Electoral College once and for all. If it ever had its usefulness as a means of guaranteeing that a president had to be elected by a diverse geographical population and not just those in a few large states, that rationale no longer existed for many commentators.

The intense public interest in the close election of 2000, the debate over the Supreme Court’s remarkable intrusion into presidential politics, and the push for election reform, including the end of the Electoral College, were big stories in America—for a very short time. As the nation busied itself with “business as usual,” complacency about the election seemed to set in—except perhaps among a handful of Democratic true believers convinced that their man was the “real” president.

But in a broader historical sweep, the strange election of 2000 was more or less forgotten a year later, eclipsed by the events of September 11, 2001.

Must Read:
Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election
by Jeffrey Toobin;
Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary
edited by E. J. Dionne Jr. and William Kristol.

Where is Fox Mulder when we need him?

Remember the child’s rhyme about the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead? “When she was good, she was very, very good. When she was bad she was horrid.”

That sort of summarizes the history of the FBI during the past twenty years. It was, to put it another way, the best of times and the worst of times for the G-men.

To an older generation of television-watching Americans, the FBI was always perfect. Every week, an FBI agent played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr. solved a crime, supposedly taken from FBI case files, within an hour. But by the time
The X-Files
appeared, a new disillusioned generation, fed on tales of cover-ups, conspiracy, and questionable competence, saw the FBI as a bureau of disinformation campaigns and malevolent leadership. The Truth may be “out there,” as Agent Fox Mulder of
The X-Files
told us each week, but it probably lies somewhere between these television views of the FBI.

The recent history of the FBI—and related intelligence and law enforcement agencies like the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), and the CIA—is a record of stunning successes combined with embarrassing and dismal failures.

•
Ruby Ridge:
The confrontation between federal agents and the Weaver family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, became one of the most controversial and widely discussed examples of abuse of federal power, feeding a whole subculture of Americans who distrust their government. Ruby Ridge began with an abortive arrest by U.S. marshals of a self-proclaimed Christian white separatist named Randall Weaver. The Weaver family lived in a remote mountain cabin near Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho. Their racist and anti-Semitic views would be anathema to the vast majority of Americans. Randall Weaver had failed to appear for a hearing on a charge of selling unregistered firearms—two sawed-off shotguns—to an BATF undercover agent in 1989. This failure was due to a typographical error in the letter advising Weaver of the date for his court appearance. The court nonetheless issued a bench warrant for his arrest. (A jury later determined Weaver had been entrapped although the Justice Department investigation of the case found that there was no illegal entrapment.)

On August 21, 1992, during a check of Weaver’s property—which, it was later determined, constituted an illegal search by the marshals—one of Weaver’s dogs began to bark and was shot by a federal agent. It was later revealed that one of the marshals had thrown stones at the dogs to see what it would take to agitate them. A gun battle ensued, and Weaver’s fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, was shot in the back while running away. In the gunfire that followed, a marshal was also shot and killed.

The next day, when Randy Weaver stepped out of his cabin to retrieve his son’s body, an FBI sniper shot him. As Weaver and two companions tried to get back in the cabin, Weaver’s wife, Vicki, stood in the cabin doorway holding an infant. The sniper fired again, killing Mrs. Weaver instantly. According to FBI guidelines, deadly force is allowed only when necessary to protect someone against immediate danger. These limits are implicit in the Constitution and have been established through Supreme Court rulings.

At a subsequent trial, the government claimed that Weaver and another man were shot because they had threatened to shoot at an FBI helicopter. The judge threw out that charge for insufficient evidence. An Idaho jury found Weaver and a companion innocent on most of the serious charges against them. Weaver’s attorney, Gerry Spence, said afterward, “A jury today has said that you can’t kill somebody just because you wear badges, and then cover up those homicides by prosecuting the innocent.”

A later investigation of the fiasco by the Justice Department, one of the most intensive internal reviews of an FBI investigation ever, concluded in a 1994 report that the FBI’s hostage rescue team overreacted to the threat of violence and instituted a shoot-on-sight policy that violated bureau guidelines and Fourth Amendment restrictions on police power. The FBI disciplined twelve agents and employees, including Larry Potts—the head of the criminal division at the time who was later promoted.

All these investigations and recommendations came long after the fact. Too long after to be of any help when the FBI confronted its next deadly siege, near a Texas town called Waco.

Must Read:
From Freedom to Slavery: The Rebirth of Tyranny in America
by Gerry Spence.

•
Waco:
On February 28, 1993, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms staged a disastrous raid on a ramshackle compound in Mount Carmel, Texas, ten miles east of Waco. More than 100 agents were serving arrest warrants for gun violations on members of the Branch Davidian religious sect and its leader, David Koresh. A high school dropout, Koresh, like many cult leaders, was a charismatic type whose rambling discourses on the Bible and the coming apocalypse enthralled his followers. And like other cult leaders, Koresh had begun to use his religious leadership as a sexual tool. He preached that women members of the group had to have sex with him to become true disciples, and he had allegedly fathered as many as a dozen children by different “wives,” some of them girls as young as twelve years old.

He allegedly used traditional mind-manipulation techniques on his followers. A spartan environment, surrender of possessions, and slavish loyalty were used to create a world in which the sect members were utterly dependent on him. Discipline was central to Koresh’s methods, and often inhumane. Children were routinely paddled to the point of bleeding. Adults were forced to stand in sewage pits. Nonetheless, while their practices were considered bizarre, immoral, or even illegal, many sect members held jobs outside the compound.