Daily Inspiration Quote by John Fund

There’s a sneaky bit of loaded nostalgia baked into John Fund’s line: “as in 2000.” It’s not a neutral timestamp; it’s a political shorthand meant to trigger a specific civic trauma - Bush v. Gore, recount chaos, hanging chads, and the sense that ordinary ballots got muscled offstage by process. By invoking that year, Fund compresses a sprawling fight over legitimacy into a single, instantly legible cautionary tale.

The sentence is engineered around a power swap. “Taken away” frames voters as dispossessed owners of democracy, while “turned over” casts lawyers and judges as unelected custodians who seize control through technicalities. It’s populist in structure, even coming from a journalist: the people vs. the priesthood of procedure. The “lawyers and the courts” pairing is deliberate redundancy, less about legal accuracy than about stacking institutions that read as remote, expensive, and insulated from accountability.

The specific intent is to warn - and to pre-blame. If an election outcome becomes contested, the subtext suggests the contest itself is already a democratic failure, regardless of what the law requires. It also implies that legal remedies are inherently suspect, a form of elite substitution for public choice.

Context matters because American elections are designed to be litigable: deadlines, ballot access, recount rules. Fund’s phrasing doesn’t deny that; it argues that the optics are corrosive. The real target isn’t the courtroom, it’s the legitimacy gap that opens when democracy feels like it’s being decided in briefs instead of booths.