From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Three Honest Democrats
In Praise of Judges Sauls, Lewis and Burton.
History might have been different for Al Gore and George W. Bush if a fateful breakfast meeting of the judges on Leon County, Fla.'s circuit court had gone differently. On Nov. 27, shortly after 8 a.m., the chief judge of the circuit called a private meeting to decide how the judge who would hear Mr. Gore's lawsuit for a recount of disputed ballots in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties would be selected.
According to the Washington Post, the chief judge, George S. Reynolds III, had a proposition. He wanted to skip the normal computer rotation that randomly assigns judges to cases and instead pick the judge himself. Accounts vary on why the plan was abandoned, but it may have involved a leak to the news media from a party who heard about the proposal.
Because the computer lottery in assigning cases was preserved, the Gore lawsuit landed in the lap of Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who yesterday delivered a blistering defeat to the Gore "dream team" of trial lawyers, led by David Boies. Dan Abrams, the legal analyst for NBC News, called it "all all-out slam dunk" against Gore.
Many liberal commentators have already begun criticizing Judge Sauls's opinion as overly harsh. Carl Bernstein of Voter.com said on "Rivera Live" that Southern courts are often rife with politics and, after all, this judge "is supposed to be a Republican."
The only problem is that Judge Sauls is in fact a registered Democrat. He was appointed by Gov. Bob Martinez, a Republican, in 1989, but back then most senior lawyers in the state were Democrats and so were a near-majority of Martinez appointments.
Judge Sauls is one of three judges who have distinguished themselves as rising above partisan considerations in the heated battle for Florida's 25 electoral votes.
First came Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis, a Democrat who was appointed by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles. A week after the election, he ruled that GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris had to give reasonable consideration to accepting vote totals after the Nov. 14 deadline set by law. But he also ruled that Ms. Harris didn't violate his order when she rejected new ballot totals from county election boards. He acted under the longstanding principle in Florida law that grants judicial deference to actions by state agencies.
Judge Lewis's order was overturned by Florida's notoriously activist Supreme Court, but his restrained ruling was rehabilitated with yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision vacating the Florida high court's flexible deadline for counting ballots.
After the Florida Supreme Court opened the door to the counting of dimpled ballots, pregnant chads and even stray marks on ballots as signs of "voter intent," at least one judge tried to exercise some fair and consistent standards. Judge Charles Burton, chairman of the Palm Beach County elections board, is a registered Democrat who once served an internship for Sen. Ted Kennedy. He first tried to avoid a recount by suggesting the board seek advice from Secretary of State Harris. When he was outvoted, he guided the board into accepting a standard in which punch-card ballots had to show at least some effort to vote for a particular candidate.
Judge Burton eventually ended up in Judge Sauls's courtroom as a witness. "We have been dealing with marks that are barely identifiable to the human eye, from a pinhole all the way to what has become a dimpled or pregnant chad," he confessed in explaining what the board's work consisted of. But unlike the slapdash Broward County elections board, which counted almost everything up to soup stains, the more sensible standards of the Palm Beach board didn't run roughshod over common sense. .
Each of the three judges involved clearly took some political risks for not bending to partisan pressures. Judges Lewis and Sauls are elected judges in Leon County, which includes the state capital of Tallahassee. It's a heavily Democratic area, giving Al Gore 62% of its votes this month. Judge Burton must run for re-election in Palm Beach County, where Mr. Gore won 65% of the vote and where a Democratic state representative is already leading a recall effort against Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach elections supervisor, who designed the infamous "butterfly ballot." If Madame Buttlerfly is in political jeopardy, so too could be Judge Burton when he next comes before the voters.
As far as anyone can determine, none of these three men operated out of partisan considerations. As Democrats, they probably had their own opinions on who should be president. But they remained judges first, exercising a fidelity to the rule of law. When histories of the 2000 presidential election are written, these three men will deserve more than honorable mention in a story that has had more than its share of knaves, fools and blind partisans.
