One thing I've been meaning to post about -- I thought this Dahlia Lithwick article on the 9th circuit's original decision was pretty good until I reached the end:
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The fun has to stop now, of course. The logic of the panel (and of the original Bush decision) would hold that any election with differing voting apparatus is inherently unconstitutional. And that renders every election, past and future, illegal. That cannot be the law. Since there is no principled way to apply the law of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court should get its initial unprincipled request and see the holding limited to a one-stop ticket. But with the high court reluctant to step in and say that, it may be up to the en banc panel to clean up their mess. (Click here for an explanation of how their en banc process works.) Whether these 11 judges will join their comrades in lording it over the Supremes, or behave more judiciously than did the court itself in 2001, is really the question they must now face. "They started it," isn't an answer on the playground. It can't be the answer on the bench.
Now, I'm not a judicial scholar of, say, Ann Coulter's stature, but it seems me that throwing up the bad rulings of higher courts back in their faces is about the only thing a lower court CAN do to make a higher court rethink a bad decision and do what it's supposed to do - establish precedents and guidelines for other courts to follow. Lithwick seems to be advocating everyone just ignore the reasoning behind one of the most important judicial decisions in recent history. The press says ignore it. The politicians say ignore it. And now, even the COURTS are supposed to ignore it.
Screw that.