Bush v. Gore

In 2000, in Bush v. Gore, the Rehnquist Court, by a 5-4 margin, called off vote-counting by the state of Florida and determined the outcome of a presidential election in favor of one lucky Texan.

In 2010, in Citizens United, the Roberts Court, by a 5-4 margin, declared that private corporations have a First Amendment right to engage in unlimited campaign spending and likely altered, for as long as anyone can see, the outcome of every major contested election in the country in favor of CEOs and Republican consultants who bundle their money.

The Supreme Court stole one election and sold off the rest of them.

In the decade that has passed between these two miserable bookends, we have seen the relentless erosion of civil liberty and democratic values, bureaucratic drift into permanent aggressive war, and a corporate-powered assault on the economic security and workplace rights of the citizenry.

Given how far we have strayed from what is best in America, defenders of our new plutocratic arrangements must return to Bush v. Gore in order to rehabilitate it, obfuscate it, and sweeten its unbearable stench. They will keep going back because it was the decision that first threw the principle of democracy-under-the-rule-of-law entirely to the wolves.

Like clockwork, columnist George Will returned to the scene of the crime on the decision's 10th birthday in a column in The Washington Post. Bemused, he found "remarkably little damage" from the "institutional collisions" that took place over the Supreme Court's unprecedented intervention to stop the counting of more than 170,000 uncounted ballots in Florida.

Although Will throws up a lot of pregnant-chad and dimpled-chad confetti, certain things never appear in his delusional account. For example: Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who moonlighted as Chair of the George W. Bush for president campaign. Governor Jeb Bush. Systematic vote-purging in the African-American community, with more than 17,000 people turned away at the polls because Harris' state-paid private consultant determined, with her enthusiastic encouragement, that their names resembled those of convicted felons. The statutory disenfranchisement of 400,000 convicts. The unlawful disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands more through polling place skullduggery, ballot manipulation and failed machinery. The oddity of Holocaust survivors and Jewish grandmothers in Palm Beach casting their ballots for Patrick Buchanan. The fact that the electoral college "loser," Vice-President Al Gore, had a national popular majority of more than 500,000 votes.

But above all: The utter fraud of the Supreme Court majority decision in the case.

Will's analysis of the Court's decision never quite happens, but the one clear point that emerges from his scattershot musings is his contempt for what the Florida Supreme Court called "the will of the people" and that state high court's laser-like focus on getting the election boards to judge hundreds of thousands of uncounted ballots based on "the intent of the voter."

Will's contempt for the key democratic concepts makes perfect sense. Although every state in the Union, including Texas, bases its elections on these same ideas, our electoral-industrial complex regards elections as an intermittent and carefully controlled opportunity for the public to ratify the choices of corporate America and the national security state. Any dramatic popular surges that depart from this script can be suppressed, even at the price of the rule of law itself.

The Rehnquist Court's thuggish offenses against the Constitution in Bush v. Gore reach into the dozens and cannot be itemized, much less analyzed, in anything short of a law review article or book. Every citizen who thinks about democracy should read at least one of them.

But in case you bump into a victim of George Will's smug celebration of the original derailment of political democracy in the new century, you might mention the following: