The 2004 election ju…

The 2004 election just keeps making history. And exposing extremists.

small group of Democrats agreed Thursday to force House and Senate debates on Election Day problems in Ohio before letting Congress certify President Bush’s win over Sen. John Kerry in November.

While Bush’s victory is not in jeopardy, the Democratic challenge will force Congress to interrupt tallying the Electoral College vote, which had been scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. EST Thursday. It would be only the second time since 1877 that the House and Senate were forced into separate meetings to consider electoral votes.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., signed a challenge mounted by House Democrats to Ohio’s 20 electoral votes, which put Bush over the top. By law, a protest signed by members of the House and Senate requires both chambers to meet separately for up to two hours to consider it. Lawmakers are allowed to speak for no more than five minutes each.

“I have concluded that objecting to the electoral votes from Ohio is the only immediate way to bring these issues to light by allowing you to have a two-hour debate to let the American people know the facts surrounding Ohio’s election,” Boxer wrote in a letter to Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, a leader of the Democratic effort.

To give you an idea of how rare, and (in this case) silly this is, consider that this hasn’t happened since 1877, and this time around the vast majority of Democrats don’t want to do this.

Many Democrats oppose challenging the Ohio vote, concerned that it would do little but antagonize voters who consider the election over. The numbers are also politically daunting: Bush won an Ohio recount by more than 118,000 votes, and won nationally by more than 3 million.

But Bush and Jones and the other Democrats involved have either voters just as extreme, or have such short attention spans that they won’t remember this.

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