The Supremes Draw the Line

Almost eight years to the day after the Supreme Court handed the presidency to the worst president ever, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States.

Yes, it was December 11, 2000, a date which will live in infamy, that a Court that was marked by hostility to claims of Equal Protection of the laws decided that as a one-time-only deal it would lean on the Equal Protection Clause to overturn the election results in Florida, stop the counting of the ballots, and install George W. Bush in the White House. Years later, the only defense that the Thug in Chief, Antonin Scalia, will utter in defense of this patently political decision is, "Get over it."

Yet this year, faced with another opportunity to override the will of the people, the claim was apparently too much for them. Was it that the Court, packed even more strongly with doctrinaire Republicans, had decided the rule of law was too important? Was it that they wanted to try to regain some of their badly damaged reputation? Was it that, as palpably absurd as their reasoning had been in 2000, it would have been an even greater stretch to throw out a second Democratic win? Or was it simply that, with Nixon henchman Rehnquist gone, they just didn't have the stomach for another fight?

We'll never know. What we do know, though, is that the tinfoil hat crowd who are claiming that Obama is not a citizen, or not a natural born citizen, are not going away.