- Politics, Institutions, and Public Opinion
- Campaigns & Elections
Friday, December 12, marks twenty-five years since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore, which decided the outcome of Florida’s presidential election and, ultimately, America’s choice for its forty-third president. The date doesn’t pop up on the calendar as do other moments in the republic’s history, either celebratory (July 4) or tragic (September 11). But what transpired a quarter of a century ago matters thus: reverse the decision and it’s quite possibly a very different America.
Let’s begin with the obvious: President Al Gore, not George W. Bush.
And let’s add a caveat: despite the change in commanders in chief, the 9/11 attacks still occur.
How does Gore respond to the unprecedented act of terrorism? Perhaps he follows the same model as Bush: congressional authorization of use of military force a week after the attacks, followed nineteen days later by the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom and bombing sorties over Afghanistan.
But does Gore order boots on the ground in the hunt for Osama bin Laden?
What history suggests: Al Gore, a Vietnam veteran, was not a fan of land warfare. As some alternative historians have posited: Gore, drawing on his experience as Bill Clinton’s vice president, repeats the US move in Kosovo from two years earlier: a limited bombing campaign.
Assuming there’s no land campaign in Afghanistan, what about Iraq? Gore, like Bush, delivers a State of the Union address the following January, but three words are noticeably absent: axis of evil.
What does Gore try to sell to Congress instead? Here, we turn to an actual speech Gore delivered two weeks after Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address and this passage:
“We must also expand our idea of what constitutes a threat to our security in the long run and be prepared to confront and deal with these things, too. It is time to accept that massive environmental disorder including global warming is literally a threat to international peace and stability.”
“We must finally develop alternatives to Mideastern oil, internal combustion engines, inefficient boilers, and the inertia that has paralyzed needed efforts at conservation.”
“HIV/AIDS is a national security threat . . .”
“We must acknowledge that the utter poverty of hundreds of millions of people is not a matter for compassion only, but a threat in the long term to the growth and vigor of the global economic system. . . . ”
“Globalized crime is a cousin to globalized terror, and along with corruption needs to be dealt with as an urgent threat to civil society.”
What this means: while Gore has avoided Lyndon Johnson’s experience of getting bogged down in a ground war, he mimics LBJ as a Democratic president trying to exist on a diet of guns (the war on terror) and butter (addressing myriad social woes).
Does this mean Gore is driven out of office, as was Johnson? Not necessarily. Let’s also speculate that, like Bush, the incumbent enjoys a “rally ’round the flag” effect in 2004.
A different Bush
What comes next, in 2008? Gore’s vice president, Joe Lieberman, would seem the heir apparent. But would he survive a primary run against Hillary Clinton? As for Barack Obama, “hope” would seem a tough message given that a lame-duck Gore is saddled with the same Great Recession that sullied the end of Bush’s second term. Add a public itching for change—in this scenario, Democrats have controlled the White House for sixteen consecutive years—and the election would seem easy pickings for the Republican nominee.
But who is that standard-bearer?
Let’s rule out George W. Bush and John McCain (the later losing to Gore in 2004) and go instead with another Bush: brother Jeb. In 2008, he’s not long removed from two successful terms as Florida’s governor. Nor is he haunted by the long shadow of his brother’s presidency, which kept him from running until 2016. Instead, Jeb Bush barnstorms across America in 2008 as a government-streamlining “conservative hurricane,” as opposed to Gore’s expansive social agenda.
With Bush 44 in office, there is no creature like ObamaCare or 2009’s Recovery Act—$787 billion in federal spending that spawned a rebellious, anti-establishment Tea Party movement. Which leads to yet another question: without the Obama brand of smug progressivism as a foil (by the time Obama left office, Democrats held the fewest number of elected offices nationwide since the 1920s) and the Tea Party as a tailwind, does Donald Trump dabble in presidential politics?
Or, sensing that populism looms on the horizon and will take root in America if it finds a shaman, does a forward-thinking Bush persuade NFL owners in 2014 to allow Trump to buy the Buffalo Bills?
The one thing Jeb Bush can’t do: prevent the American electorate from changing course yet again when his second terms ends. But who rescues the Democratic Party in 2016? It’s not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama—by this point, both are multi-term senators and hardly fresh faces (maybe no deterrent for a long-standing, long-grandstanding Joe Biden).
Instead, “Obama-mania” emerges in the form of Deval Patrick, two years removed from serving as the first black governor of Massachusetts. What Patrick tell Americans on Election Night is the same as ten years earlier, on the occasion of his first gubernatorial win: “You are every black man, woman, and child in Massachusetts and America, and every other striver of every race and kind, who is reminded tonight that the American dream is for you, too.”
For Patrick, the dream turns into a nightmare as a pandemic complicates his presidency—just as the 9/11 attacks were an unexpected plot twist for Gore. But in 2020, let’s give Patrick a second term because the anti-woke COVID backlash hasn’t fully matured (i.e., Americans have yet to learn that social distancing is arbitrary).
That leaves us with one final presidential election in 2024. Since Florida gave America two presidents, Gore and Jeb Bush, let’s add a third: a 53-year-old Marco Rubio, whose rise in national politics speaks to Republican struggles to attract youth and Latino voters.
The court that never was
While we ponder a different Washington, consider how a reversal of Bush v. Gore changes life inside the neoclassical “temple of justice” located across from the US Capitol.
In this alternate political universe, President Gore chooses Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and the late William Rehnquists’s successors.
Replace President Obama with President Jeb Bush and the latter chooses Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens’s successors—and possibly the replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia, depending on which party controls the Senate amidst the 2016 election. President Patrick would get to reshape the court after Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer’s retirement, plus Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s passing.
That’s five appointments for Democrats presidents versus only three for a Republican, leaving the present-day court with a 5-4 balance to the left.
For all the talk of change, there’s one other element in American politics that stays the same regardless of the outcome of Bush v. Gore: eroding confidence in election integrity. Change the presidencies and the nation is still in store for a quarter of a century of second-guessing how elections are administered and votes are counted—a disturbing trend currently being examined by the Hoover Institution’s Improving American Elections research program.
In hindsight, the Bush v. Gore decision was the culmination of unprecedented political drama in modern American, thirty-six days of legal wrangling that kept a nation and a transitioning federal government in suspense.
And, fittingly for a divided nation, two members on the majority side who, years later, would find themselves divided over the action:
As Justice Scalia saw it: “The only question . . . was whether the presidency would be decided by the Florida Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court. That was the only question and that’s not a hard one.”
However, Justice O’Connor would later lament that the court “took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue. . . . Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ ”
And, if Madame Justice had had it her way, hello to a lot of what-ifs.
