Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Folly: Bush vs. Gore Revisited

Officials and government insiders are ditching the Bush administration faster than the corporate sponsors that dumped Michael Vick, the disgraced quarterback recently indicted for dogfighting. Put simply, being associated with the administration of George W. Bush is becoming a badge of dishonor. For instance, Alan Greenspan, Paul O’Neill, Matthew Dowd, Colin Powell, and a host of others are stepping forward to preemptively disassociate themselves from the disasters Bush has wrought. The latest is former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who now describes Bush – the candidate she voted for twice in the 2000 election! -- as “arrogant, lawless, incompetent, and extreme.”

O’Connor’s mea culpa is on target, if a bit late. But her broadside against Bush could very well describe the majority’s dubious legal rationale in the infamous Bush vs. Gore decision, where she was the decisive vote that installed the very man she now derides. Talk about flip-floppers.

The vast majority of Constitutional scholars have long recognized that the Court’s decision in that case was right out of Alice in Wonderland – “Sentence first, verdict later.” Put simply, the majority disgraced itself when it abrogated its responsibility to be an impartial umpire and instead allowed itself to become an instrument for pursuing and exploiting partisan advantage.

Justice O’Connor (if putting those two words together don't amount to an oxymoron) put her ties to the Bush family and the Republican Party before her loyalty to the country and the cause of justice and equality before the law. In her most important decision she revealed herself to be nothing more than a political hack. Her legal reasoning, always shallow at best, was especially thin in the case of Bush vs. Gore. Interestingly, in overturning the will of the electorate – the majority of whom had voted for Gore – the fastidious O’Connor went on the blame Florida’s voters for being sloppy and stupid with their ballots. The verdict of history, however, is in the process of reversing O’Connor’s decision. It isn’t stupid and sloppy voters in Florida -- who had to contend with illegal purges, confusing ballot designs, systematic irregularities, inferior punch card voting machines, and the like -- who got it wrong, it is O’Connor who screwed up. And she botched it with a decision filled with stupid, sloppy, and disingenuous reasoning. At least O’Connor can see how wrong she was. Now that’s what I call poetic justice.

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