Ken Mehlman, Lee Atwater and Sandra Day O'Connor Walk Into a Bar...*

From the Chicago Tribune:

O'Connor questions court's decision to take Bush v. Gore 

In interview at Tribune, retired justice also calls for merit selection of judges

By Dahleen Glanton, Chicago Tribune reporter April 27, 2013

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor hasn't given much thought to which was the most important case she helped decide during her 25 years on the bench. But she has no doubt which was the most controversial.

It was Bush v. Gore, which ended the Florida recount and decided the 2000 presidential election.

Looking back, O'Connor said, she isn't sure the high court should have taken the case.

"It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," O'Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

The case, she said, "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation."

"Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision," she said. "It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."

O'Connor, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was the first woman to serve on the high court. Though she tended to side with the conservatives, O'Connor was known as the court's swing vote. Her vote in the 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision effectively gave Republican George W. Bush a victory over his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore.

...

Of course this now merely an historical curiosity and only matters to you at all if you think that Al Gore would have governed any differently than George W. Bush. That Gore would have slept through PDBs on imminent terrorist attacks, invaded Iraq on false pretenses, turned global climate change into a punch line, let the Right completely off the leash, pissed away our budget surpluses, let New Orleans drown, gotten intimately involved in the Terri Schiavo case in order to mollify the American Taliban Party, etc. etc.



*On his deathbed and long after it was too late, Atwater repented of his ruthless and deliberate use of race-baiting to win elections for Republicans.  After he lost his job as chair of rabidly anti-gay Republican Party and long after it was too late, Ken Mehlman came out as gay and said he regretted being the highly-paid tool of people whose party was built on dehumanizing and discriminating against people like him.