For Immediate Release - 30 November 2000

EDITORIAL: The Florida State Legislature and States Rights

by Dr Michael Hill
President, The League of the South

    It’s time for the Florida State Legislature to take this election bull by the horns. They have the authority and ought to use it.
    Under the system of Federalism given us by the Framers, the States elect the President through their respective Electors. This is the now much-maligned Electoral College System. Article II, Section 1 of the U. S. Constitution clearly says “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in Congress.”

    To have allowed the issue in Florida to be thrown into the courts in the first place (whether state or national) was to neglect the Electoral College System in favor of direct democracy. A President elected in such a manner would be a national, rather than a federal, President, and the process would stand in contradistinction to what the Framers intended. Whether we like it or not, the State Legislatures, and not the people, have the ultimate say to whom a State’s electoral votes go. Traditionally, the Electors have been certified and given to the candidate who got the most votes within the State. But the mess we now have in Florida begs that we forget the endless wrangling over recounts and appeals to the various courts. Such machinations will only further muddy the Constitutional waters and likely serve to de-legitimize whoever becomes the next President. A simple solution would be for the Florida State Legislature to move ahead, ignore the courts, and approve the State’s Electors for one candidate or the other before the 12 December deadline. After all, the Florida Secretary of State has already certified a winner. To allow the courts to choose a President would make a mockery out of our system of Federalism (or States Rights).

    Both the Bush and Gore camps should be condemned for invading Florida on 8 November with two former Secretaries of State, batteries of Establishment lawyers, and squads of “rent-a-goons” and political hacks. In other words, the Establishment elites should have been told to keep the hell out and let Floridians themselves settle the matter through their own elected institutions and according to State law. For their part, Floridians should now demand that these interlopers go home and allow Federalism to work the way the Framers intended. Lawyers and judges have no mandate to “elect” anyone to office, and to allow such an enormity would be to undermine the separation of powers.

    Democrats undoubtedly will object to such a simple solution because Republicans overwhelmingly control the Florida Legislature. But if the situation were reversed, the Republicans would object, too. Neither party is concerned with the rule of Constitutional law; they are concerned with raw political power.

    Under present circumstances, the Democrats probably will opt to manufacture from thin air some sort of “civil rights” violations, based on the Voting Rights Act, so that Janet Reno and her misnamed Justice Department can enter the fray and undermine the proper exercise of the principle of Federalism. If this happens, or if the courts undercut the Florida Legislature, then the good people of the Sunshine State—and other fed-up Southerners—ought seriously to consider the option of secession to protect the integrity of the rule of law.

END OF RELEASE

Dr. Michael Hill
President
The League of the South