Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Brooks Brothers Riot

WYTS: Miami Dolphins. Original post here.

In a lot of ways, this century of American politics has been the Florida Century. They have been kingmakers in many elections, and look at the glory to which they have led us! They never apologize for this dumbassery either, do they? Florida has only been getting worse, and more rotten in the past twenty-six years. God bless those still in the state fighting the good fight against their neighbor's worst, most hateful impulses. Anyway, let us remember fondly the moment that Florida took center stage in American politics, really the election that standardized how we imagine American politics to work, with the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot.

If you’re ranking the civil unrests in terms of body count and actual violence, this is last. There will be several about bloody, violent elections, 2000 Florida was nothing compared to some Reconstruction elections. In this story there were no casualties, no arrests, no injuries, and no consequences, I’m not sure if there even was one fist thrown. But still, it linger as a kind of legend: the moment the election was stolen and America history turned towards darkness.

 

I should point out that the importance of this event may be a bit overblown. One afternoon of guys yelling in a hallway that was caught on TV did not decide the 2000 presidential election. Both sides get something out of mythologizing this protest. For Democrats, this was a clear case of injustice and an attack on the democratic process. For Republicans involved, you could claim you were a canny, ruthless political operative who out-smarted the enemy. Both Roger Stone and another guy, Bradley A. Blakeman, claim to have commanded this “coup” as part of their self-aggrandizing. And I would not be surprised if they're both full of shit.

But does that mean the Brooks Brothers Riot didn’t matter at all? Oh no. You don’t get a January 6th without a November 22nd.

So rewind to the year 2000, and if you’re me, you’re 9 and you’re mostly focused on Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing on Toonami. The rest of the country would have been better off joining me instead of getting addicted to CNN and Fox News. Those channels are making a meal out of this whole presidential election business. Cable news is going to define political discourse for a decade, until we found something even worse in the 2010s, Twitter. Nobody knew they were in a Red or Blue state until this election, which is where the campaign color maps come from. This was the longest presidential election of my lifetime, with no winner chosen until well into December.

The 2000 election was a classic example of “aw, crap, both these dudes suck”. The popular perception at the time was choosing between a boring nerd and a dumbass. Al Gore was Bill Clinton’s vice president, so you’re looking at more Third Way, New Democrat neoliberalism, I can't imagine he would have been so bold with his environmentalism if he actually was president. Maybe do not get too teary eyed about the counterfactuals. (Joe Lieberman was the Vice Presidential nominee, oof.) George W. Bush was the death penalty-friendly governor of Texas, and our first Evangelical presidential nominee. He had defeated John McCain after his campaign implied that McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget was actually an African bastard child – never be fooled into thinking W. was a good person. Bush II would do anything to win, and did do anything.

You’ll notice that this is not really an election that was “about” anything. In 2004 we had gay marriage and the Iraq War defining the battle. In 2000, both parties were not that far away from each other, no matter how angry the arguments were at the time. History was still over, so it was really a personality dispute. We just needed to find the right man to bring history back. And oh did we ever find him...

So election Tuesday, November 7th, 2000, Al Gore wins the popular vote. However, due to our constitution being written with an entirely different country in mind than we the one we have, the Electoral College is what decides things. That means the great Sunshine State’s 25 electoral votes will choose the winner. Gore concedes early the morning of the 8th, when it appears that Bush is going to win Florida by 10,000 votes. All the big news networks paint the state red. But by 4:30 AM, with votes coming in from the three heavily Democratic counties in the Southeast corner of the state, Bush’s lead is only 1,784. That triggers an automatic recount.

See, the ugly secret about American elections is how fallible and corrupt they are. Any election is going have a failure rate that is disturbingly high. We are not quite in 19th century territory where you could vote four times a day or the dead could walk into polling stations, but still, there’s a lot of weirdness going on in Florida. By the 10th, Bush’s lead is down to about 300 votes, even with a lot of counties never doing the recount they were supposed to do at all. Plus there’s an issue of unclear or vague marks on ballots, the infamous hanging chad issue, where the machine punch did not fully remove the circle. The details of the legal battle are complicated to absurd degrees and there have been dozens of reviews of this election. It does not help that Florida’ Secretary of State was Katherine Harris, a co-chair of the Bush FL campaign, and the governor was Jeb “please clap” Bush. It was a near-tie election but Bush had the power in the state.

You will never find an actual count showing Gore won in Florida, just many projections that if the hand recount had been completed maybe Gore wins by about a hundred, maybe as low as 60. I don’t know who won the state in actuality. I believe in Florida so little that I’d bet Bush really did win by a small margin. Still not too late to apologize, Florida.

Now the actual riot part of this riot series is on the aforementioned November 22nd. This is in Miami-Dade County, where officials are attempting a hand recount of some 10,000 ballots the machines had been unable to tally. The argument is over whether the recount could be moved to behind some doors to speed things along for the current arbitrary deadline - the deadlines will move constantly. This is when hundreds of protestors fighting for "transparent democracy", mostly balding middle-aged men with nice watches and preppy clothes come storming into the building. The reporters at the time gave them the nickname the “Brooks Brothers Mob”, because this was so obviously a gang of middle aged comfortable lawyers.

To nobody’s surprise, turns out these were Republican staffers astroturfed for the job, many of whom got jobs in the new Bush regime to-be. A Democratic operative in the area, Joe Geller, nearly got stomped to death, he claims. The cacophony of shouts and noise was so bad that eventually Miami-Dade County’s officials had to give up the recount, never to be finished.

It still could have concluded later on. You see, the recount battle in Florida continued for another two weeks with all kinds of different numbers coming up. This was a major legal battle, you might recognize some of the lawyers working for Bush’s side, such as John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, who would go to completely discredit an entire branch of the US government. The Florida Supreme Court, then-overwhelmingly Democratic nominees, would make multiple rulings extending the deadline and revising the counting rules. Until finally we’re into December and we still do not have a president. Still, technically we have a whole month to go and there would be no particular harm to the nation without a choice. Nobody has to take office until January.

This is where the election is truly stolen. You want a coup, here it is. It was not done by any theatrics by Brook Brothers guys led by a weirdo who dresses like a Batman villain. No, we have to go to the Supreme Court’s Bush v Gore case. That shut down all recounts before they were completed and handed the election to Bush. Their 14th amendment’s reading meant that Bush and his voters would be irreparably harmed by a full counting. They noted that the count could never be fair, with so many odd cases along the way, including how Miami-Dade County had never finished its recount because… oh yeah, the Brooks Brothers Riot. Most commentators have found this ruling was a particularly bad moment in SCOTUS’s history (even noted asshole Alan Dershowitz was against it). But don’t worry, SCOTUS will have plenty of bad moments to come in our lifetimes.

Bush would then spend the next eight years ending the End of History. This would become apparent the next fall when terrorists knocked down skyscrapers on his watch. Florida is now a blood Red State, a bastion of anti-trans hatred and severe censorship of college professors. Since its population only grows every passing year, it gets more powerful each presidential cycle. The Brooks Brothers Riot did not get us here to this moment of absolute terror, but it sure didn’t help. In the year 2020, when self-made Florida Man Donald Trump was on the ballot, he’d try similar tactics with a more blatant putsch.

Florida is going to be real important in 2028. I'm sure Florida will make the wrong call, and I'll take your apology early since we never do get it late.