The End of the Struggle

In its immediate effect, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday evening would seem to deal a crushing blow to Vice President Al Gore’s flickering presidential hopes. But longer term, the extraordinarily bitter set of decisions this case has generated will taint this court with disquieting questions about its distance from the partisan fray.

In a historic late-night ruling, the high court held that the recount ordered last week by the Florida Supreme Court violated the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees. The court’s ruling said that seven of the nine justices agreed that constitutional problems existed with the recount ordered by the state court.

But in another part of its ruling, the high court split 5 to 4 in holding that new recounts should not be ordered to remedy the problem. The conservative majority, all Republican appointees, agreed that there is not enough time to conduct the recounts in a way that would pass constitutional muster before the Electoral College meets Monday to pick the next president.

Unless the recounts resume, Gore has no chance to overcome Bush’s lead in Florida, which has dwindled to less than 200 votes, and thus win the White House.

The decision appears to put Gore in a no-win situation, one which Democratic leaders began to acknowledge soon after its release. And with few if any remaining legal options, the pressure on the vice president to concede from within his own party has begun to mount.

But should he concede, Gore will do so believing, as do many Americans, that a full vote count in Florida--a step this court has now effectively blocked--was the only fair way to decide this election.

Yet, as Justice John Paul Stevens noted in an eloquent dissent: “In the interest of finality . . . the majority effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent--and are therefore legal votes under state law--but were for some reason rejected by ballot-counting machines. . . . Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law.”