Retired Justice John Paul Stevens says the Supreme Court has not recovered from self-inflicted damage to its reputation stemming from its Bush v. Gore decision that effectively decided the 2000 presidential race for Republican nominee George W. Bush.
“As much as I wish that the public confidence that the court had earned a few years earlier when it ordered President Nixon to produce tapes containing evidence of his wrongdoing could be so easily restored, I remain of the view that the Court has not fully recovered from the damage it inflicted on itself in Bush v. Gore,” Stevens, 99, wrote in his new memoir, The Making of a Justice.
The Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 presidential election came after a political firestorm erupted in Florida after then-Texas Gov. Bush appeared on election night to have a razor-thin lead over Vice President Al Gore, his Democratic rival. The margin of victory triggered an automatic machine recount in the state, after which Gore requested manual recounts in four counties when Bush’s lead narrowed.
Despite the “extraordinary closeness” of the election and litigation filed in federal and state court immediately after the November election, Stevens wrote he did not believe the high court would play a role in the dispute.
The case “snuck up on all of us,” he wrote, referencing himself and his four law clerks for the Supreme Court’s October 2000 term.
“The intuition my clerks and I shared that the court would not become involved in the dispute was sound, but it proved to be, as my clerks later described it, shockingly wrong,” Stevens said.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled 5-4 along ideological lines to halt the manual recount requested by Gore’s team and found the manual recount ordered in Florida violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
The ruling from the high court effectively decided the presidency for Bush and prompted charges that the Supreme Court’s conservative wing sought out a legal rationale to issue a partisan ruling.
Stevens was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Gerald Ford in 1975, and through the course of his nearly 35-year tenure on the high court, he became a reliable member of its liberal wing.
Stevens retired from the Supreme Court in 2010.
