someone today, on a trans mailing list, asked: "how can we put our trust in the supreme court after Roe?"
and I.
you're older than me, where were you for bush v gore
The thing I very clearly remember from the Bush v Gore aftermath is that the media very effectively painted Al Gore as being completely unreasonable when in my eyes it was super obvious the republicans were trying to use voter suppression techniques to get their dumbass of a guy the Florida electoral votes. I was in 8th grade. It was clear and unmistakable.
my parents were very active in politics when I was growing up and made it clear that democrats were Not Good Enough. we were a staunch Nader household in 2000, when I was ten -- not because we thought he'd win, but because we wanted him to get enough of the vote that the Greens could finally get federal election funding.1 my dad even took me to a Nader rally in Rochester, NY. I will never feel that excited for a campaign rally ever again.
If you weren't there/don't know much about it, Republicans hijacked Florida in the most obvious way possible. Katherine Harris was both Florida Secretary of State and the co-chair of the Bush campaign efforts in her state, and was somehow allowed to purge 173,000 voters from the rolls in addition to the "hanging chad" ballot fiasco that made all the headlines.
the Supreme Court2 took this whole situation a once-over and decided to give Bush the presidency anyway. and as one of the biggest schmucks in U.S. history ruined everything he touched for eight years, liberals whined about how it was all Ralph Nader and the Green Party's fault, and not, you know, naked political corruption and conspiracy.
U.S. conservatism has always been like this.
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elections aren't publicly funded like this in the U.S. anymore, but at the time, it was a pretty big deal for some reform-minded leftists like my parents.
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hey clarence thomas was there, I wonder if any of his "close friends" had an opinion about who should be president
