Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: Maybe Bush v. Gore Wasn't the Best Decision

From AlterNet:

“Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision,” she said. “It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.“

If nothing else, Bush v. Gore demonstrates how justices who are determined to reach a certain result are capable of bending both the law and their own prior jurisprudence in order to achieve it. In Bush, the five conservative justices held, in the words of Harvard’s Larry Tribe, that “equal protection of the laws required  giving no protection of the laws to the thousands of still uncounted ballots.”

The Court’s decision to hand the presidency to Bush stunned many legal observers, some of whom were O’Connor’s fellow justices. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens once recounted a story where he ran into fellow Justice Stephen Breyer at a party while a relatively early phase of the case was pending before the Court. According to Stevens, “ [w]e agreed that the application was frivolous.”

More here.

I don't even know what to say about this.  I mean, okay, it's very cool that O'Connor is acknowledging what any and all honest observers have known since December of 2000: Supreme Court justices, like all lawyers, are not legal calculating machines, and are prone to all the same human failings in judgment that afflict all human beings.  That is, Bush v Gore was an incomprehensible mess, clearly a highly partisan move misusing judicial power to install the majority's preferred candidate, without any legal justification of which to speak.  Nice to see she's joined the twenty first century.

But this is way too little, way too late.  I don't know what would have happened to this country with a President Gore instead of what we got, but Bush's presidency was never legitimate.  We went through years of chaos and hell, and we haven't even really started to recover from it all.  I wonder how she sleeps at night.

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