The Legacy of Bush v. Gore

Abstract

THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION of November 2000 already ranks as one of the most remarkable in U.S. history, and it will probably soon prove to be one of the most analyzed, dissected, and chronicled. The close vote between Al Gore and George Bush itself underlined the evenness of U.S. partisan divisions and the existence of what Michael Barone has described as a “49% nation.”1 The narrowness of the vote and the disputes about several aspects of the election in Florida prompted an unprecedented 5 weeks of legal battling as Gore challenged the outcome in the state that held the key to the presidency. During the legal challenges, the nation’s attention was drawn to the intricacies of state electoral law and machinery, especially the wayward behavior of chads. The failure of Gore, the winner of the popular vote, to translate that popular majority into an electoral college majority cast doubt on the legitimacy of the eventual winner of the White House and on the mechanism of the electoral college. And the unprecedented intervention of the Supreme Court to resolve a presidential election itself turned the spotlight on the Court and its relationship to the wider political system. As Justice Stevens put it in his dissent, “Although we may never with complete certainty know the identity of the winner of the 2000 election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”2 Thus, the case of Bush v Gore3 inevitably thrust the Supreme Court into partisan politics in a way that inevitably damaged its reputa-