Adam Cohen discusses the legal heritage of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court decision that first put George W. Bush into the White House. Here's the paragraph that most interested me…
The heart of Bush v. Gore's analysis was its holding that the recount was unacceptable because the standards for vote counting varied from county to county. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the court declared, the state may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another. If this equal protection principle is taken seriously, if it was not just a pretext to put a preferred candidate in the White House, it should mean that states cannot provide some voters better voting machines, shorter lines, or more lenient standards for when their provisional ballots get counted — precisely the system that exists across the country right now.
So, uh, how come that hasn't changed?
I know a lot of Republicans (including Antonin Scalia) tell Democrats to "get over it" but the article has a point: If it was valid law, it doesn't go away. It should be defensible in the context of ongoing legal decisions. By the way, the last person who told me to "get over it" is still posting in chat rooms that the Clintons should be arrested for the murder of Vince Foster.
I have a feeling that we're going to wake up one morning and find that some future configuration of the Supreme Court has said Bush should never have been installed in the job in 2000. The way things are going, we may see a majority of Republicans say that before long.