Second in a series of essays I wrote about Election 2000, but never posted until now, just in time for Election 2002.
A common refrain of conservatives after the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election from Al Gore and the American people was to "get over it." After Gore conceded, the standoff was over, and conservatives somehow felt that liberals and moderates should merely be happy it had all ended, regardless of how it ended and who benefited. I find this attitude amazing, although I welcome their underestimation of how their political opponents regard the result of Bush v. Gore.
Imagine pro-choice forces admonishing abortion opponents to "get over" Roe v. Wade back in 1972. This is not an idle comparison. Roe v. Wade has motivated countless conservatives to political action for almost three decades now. The importance of this judicial decision in spurring conservatives to action is rivaled only by the undermining of Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. And based on the results -- a federal judiciary now dominated by conservative justices -- a case can be made that they have been at least partially successful.
Reagan successfully nominated hundreds of conservative judges to federal benches, followed in kind by Bush. Then, during two Democratic administrations under Bill Clinton, the Republican Senate blocked an unprecedented 167 nominations to the federal judiciary on ideological grounds alone. The result is 20 years now of liberal and moderate judges, i.e. people most like average Americans, being in effect barred from the federal bench.
This loading of the federal judiciary has culminated in a Supreme Court with seven Republican nominees to only two Democratic. And five of those seven -- Rhenquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and O'Connor -- can only be described as ultra-conservative. And these five have now successfully conspired to steal an election for a candidate of their own political ideology. You could write a book on how bad this decision was (I recommend Vincent Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America). I will restrict my own argument to three points:
One, it is impossible to imagine that were the roles reversed, i.e. if Al Gore held a slim lead that was diminishing during recounts requested by George W. Bush, that the Supreme Court, or these five in particular, would have stepped in to stop the counting. Absolutely impossible. It never could have happened. Political bias was clearly at work here.
Two, in their per curium decision, the five conservative justices expressly forbid the ruling in Bush v. Gore to be used as a precedent in any other case. The chief duty of the Supreme Court is, in fact, to provide precedent for all other courts in the nation to follow. To disallow this decision to be used as precedent in any other case is an implicit admission that the decision is not based on sound legal reasoning.
Three, over six hundred law professors from around the country, from all political backgrounds have denounced the decision. They have signed a petition protesting the decision, and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to announce their disapproval. I could make more arguments on my own, but I think the experts can speak more convincingly than I.
For those of us who are not lawyers, who only wanted to see the foundations of our democracy respected, who wanted nothing more than an accurate accounting of the votes in Florida and were willing to live with the results, Bush v. Gore was a profound shock. We thought Supreme Court justices were supposed to conduct themselves above the fray of politics. We thought the right to vote (meaningless if your vote is not counted) was the seminal right from which all other rights in a democracy were derived. We thought that accuracy was more important than deadlines. We thought we lived in a democracy.
Bush v. Gore has shown us otherwise. We will not forget. We will not get over it. As Roe v. Wade was to conservatives, Bush v. Gore will be to us. Ask us in thirty years. We will remember.
9:39:36 PM 
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