December 12, 2000: Bush v. Gore

December 12, 2000: The Supreme Court of the United States overrules the Supreme Court of the State of Florida. It is the case of Bush v. Gore.

In the Presidential election of November 7, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, the then Vice President of the United States, Albert Arnold Gore Jr., got more popular votes than the Republican nominee, the Governor of Texas, George Walker Bush: Gore 50,999,897, Bush 50,456,002, a margin of 543,895 votes. Ralph Nader, famous as a consumer advocate since the 1960s, ran as the nominee of the Green Party. He got 2,882,955 votes. Gore got 48.4 percent of the popular vote; Bush, 47.9 percent, Nader, 2.7 percent.

Bush's brother, Governor John Ellis "Jeb" Bush of Florida, saw how close the vote was in his State, and tampered with the voting process, and that one State held everything up for 5 weeks. The best attempt at a recount, in downtown Miami, was interrupted on November 22 by what became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot. As a result, there were votes that were never counted. I don't mean they weren't recounted, I mean they were never counted, not even once.

On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that all 61,000 "undervotes" had to be counted. Had that happened, Gore surely would have won. The Bush campaign immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUS ruled on December 12:

* Four Justices ruled that the recount had to go forward: John Paul Stevens, appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford; David Souter, appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush, the current Republican nominee's father; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by the current President, Democrat Bill Clinton; and Stephen Breyer, also appointed by Clinton.

* Five Justices ruled that the recount had to stop immediately, all of them appointed by Republican Presidents: William Rehnquist, appointed by Richard Nixon, and promoted to Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan; Sandra Day O'Connor, appointed by Reagan; Antonin Scalia, appointed by Reagan; Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Reagan; and Clarence Thomas, appointed by the elder George Bush.

It was pretty easily guessed that all 4 Justices who voted to keep the recount going would do so; and that 3 Justices known for being archconservatives -- Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas -- would vote to stop it.

The question marks were 2 moderates, both known as "swing votes": O'Connor and Kennedy. If either of them had voted to keep the recount going, it would have been kept going, and Gore would have won. Instead, both voted to stop it.

And so, in an election where over 104 million votes had been accepted as counted, only two votes ended up mattering: Those of O'Connor and Kennedy.

It may have been the ghastliest decision in the Court's history, aside from the 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that said that black people weren't citizens (a decision remedied by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution). It also marked perhaps the 1st time in the nation's history that political conservatives overruled a case based in part on a State's rights.

The editors of Time magazine announced that they were waiting for a winner to be certified before they named their Person of the Year. They named Bush. Had Gore been certified as the winner, they would have chosen him.

UPDATE: It may have been surpassed as the ghastliest decision in the Court's history by Trump v. United States in 2024, when the Court ruled that Presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution.

Gore conceded the election the next day, forever doomed to be "the 42nd 1/2 President of the United States" -- a President-elect, but never a President. On January 6, 2001, in his role as the outgoing Vice President, Gore properly read the Electoral Votes, including the 25 of the State of Florida. Whether those votes were properly arrived at is another matter. Congress then certified the Electoral Votes.

On that January 6, no Democrats stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in an attempt to stop that process.

Twenty years later, of course, when it was Republicans who didn't like the result, they did storm the Capitol, and attempt to stop the process. They only delayed the inevitable.

Rehnquist died in office in 2005. O'Connor retired right before that. Souter retired in 2009. Stevens retired in 2010, and died in 2019. Scalia died in office in 2016. Kennedy retired in 2018. Ginsburg died in office in 2020. Breyer retired in 2022. As of December 12, 2022, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas and Breyer are still alive; while Thomas is the only 1 of the 9 who is still on the Court. (UPDATE: O'Connor died in 2023. Souter died in 2025.)

Bush's 2 terms in office were an unmitigated disaster, both domestically (especially economically) and internationally. Had Gore been allowed to accept his victory, he would have governed completely differently, and most Americans, including the conservatives, would have been better off.

There are elementary schools named after Bush in St. Paul, Texas; and Stockton, California. His Presidential Library is on the campus Southern Methodist University, his wife Laura's Alma Mater, in Dallas. It opened on April 25, 2013.

Statue of the George Bushes,

at George W.'s Presidential Library

Bush remains the only President born in Connecticut. He and his father are the only ones who have lived in Connecticut, not counting time spent attending Yale University, although both also did so. And they are the only ones who lived in Maine. Nevertheless, the State each represented in politics was Texas.

Bush has been played by Timothy Bottoms in a comedic fashion on That's My Bush! in 2001 and The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course in 2002, and in the deadly serious DC 9/11: Time of Crisis in 2003. Steve Bridges played him on JAG in 2002, and in the pilot episode of its spinoff, NCIS, in 2003.

He was played by James Adomian in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay in 2008, Josh Brolin (himself the son of someone much better in his profession) in Oliver Stone's film W. in 2008, Connor Trinneer in American Made in 2017, and Sam Rockwell in Vice (a film about his Vice President, Dick Cheney) in 2018.

On Saturday Night Live, he was played by Will Ferrell from 2000 to 2002, Chris Parnell in 2002-03, Will Forte from 2004 to 2006, and Jason Sudeikis thereafter. On rival show MADtv, he was played by Christian Duguay in 2000-01, Will Sasso in 2001-02, and Frank Caliendo thereafter.

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December 12, 2000 was a Tuesday. Baseball was in its off-season, and the NFL doesn't play on Tuesday. But there were 8 NBA games played that day. The New York Knicks were not in any of them:

* The New Jersey Nets beat the Minnesota Timberwolves, 116-94 at the Brendan Byrne Arena in the New York suburb of East Rutherford, New Jersey. Stephon Marbury led all scorers with 27 points.

* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Sacramento Kings, 107-99 at the Philips Arena (now the State Farm Arena) in Atlanta. Jason Terry scored 38 points.

* The Toronto Raptors beat the Indiana Pacers, 104-90 at the Air Canada Centre (now the Scotiabank Arena) in Toronto. Vince Carter led all scorers with 33.

* The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Dallas Mavericks, 92-87 at the Gund Arena in Cleveland. (It is now named the Rocket Arena.)

* The Miami Heat beat the Denver Nuggets, 96-85 at the Pepsi Center in Denver. (It is now named the Ball Arena.)

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 109-105 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Ray Allen scored 35 in victory, Shaquille O'Neal 26 and Kobe Bryant 25 in defeat.

* The Portland Trail Blazers beat the Golden State Warriors, 101-93 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena (then named The Arena in Oakland). Antawn Jamison scored 30 for the Dubs, but Rasheed Wallace's 29 sent the Blazers to victory.

* And the Seattle SuperSonics beat the Orlando Magic, 97-92 at the Key Arena in Seattle.

And there were 4 NHL games played. The New Jersey Devils were not scheduled: 

* The New York Rangers lost to the San Jose Sharks, 3-2 at the HP Center in San Jose. (It is now named the SAP Center.)

* The New York Islanders beat the Washington Capitals, 3-2 at the Nassau Coliseum in suburban Uniondale (Hempstead), Long Island, New York.

* The Buffalo Sabres beat the Boston Bruins, 3-0 at the FleetCenter in Boston. (It is now named the TD Garden.)

* And the Philadelphia Flyers and the Nashville Predators played to a tie, 2-2 at the Gaylord Entertainment Center in Nashville. (It is now the Bridgestone Arena.) 

October 15, 1991: Clarence Thomas Is Confirmed for the U.S. Supreme Court

October 15, 1991: The U.S. Senate votes to confirm Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, by a very close vote of 52-48. He got the support of 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats, while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against him.

He had been appointed by President George H.W. Bush, to fill the seat of the retiring Thurgood Marshall, who had been the 1st black Justice on the Court. Thomas was the 2nd, and, at the time, his record was so thin, liberals alleged that Bush was only appointing him because he was a black conservative. I am of the firm belief that had he been, pardon the choice of words, judged solely on his qualifications, he would have been rejected.

But women came forward to allege that he had sexually harassed them, and the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee -- especially Orrin Hatch of Utah, Alan Simpson of Wyoming, and, more than any of them, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania -- attacked the credibility of these women.

Especially ill-treated by those Senators was the most compelling witness, Anita Hill, who had recently been appointed the 1st black professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Thomas had been Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under President Ronald Reagan, and Hill testified under oath that she and other subordinates had been harassed by Thomas.

He, also under oath, denied the charges. One of them was lying; therefore, one of them was committing perjury, a federal felony. Given that Hill's testimony was calm, and Thomas' was one step below a full-on rant, it appeared that Thomas was the one lying, which not only should have disqualified him on the spot, but put him under criminal investigation.

I think the charges against Thomas made the Republicans dig their heels in, and do whatever it took to get his nomination confirmed, just for the sake of angering Democrats. Or, as would be said in the 21st Century, "to own the libs."

Thomas has been part of the conservative bulwark of the Court that gave us such unacceptable decisions as Bush v. Gore (stopping the recount of the Florida votes in the 2000 Presidential election), Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (the 2010 case that struck down campaign finance laws), and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (the 2022 case that repealed Roe v. Wade and took away a woman's Constitutionally established right to decide for herself if and when to have a child). Until Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, Thomas was notorious for simply voting the exact same way Scalia did, doing so 91 percent of the time.

Although no further allegations of sexual harassment have been leveled at Thomas, he may well be the worst Justice of the last 100 years -- and, with the death of Scalia and the retirement in 2018 of Anthony Kennedy, he is now the seniormost Justice. His wife, Ginni -- white, and flat-out crazy -- had an active role in the Capitol Insurrection of 2021.

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October 15, 1991 was a Tuesday. This was an off-day in baseball's postseason. Two days earlier, the Minnesota Twins had won the American League Pennant, beating the Toronto Blue Jays in the AL Championship Series.

It was a travel day in the National League Championship Series, with the Pittsburgh Pirates leading the Atlanta Braves, 3 games to 2, with Game 6 and, if necessary, Game 7 in Pittsburgh. But the Braves won both of those games, to take their 1st Pennant in 23 years, since 1958, when they were still in Milwaukee. The Twins went on to beat the Braves in 7 games, in one of the best World Series ever played.

Football was in midweek. The NBA season didn't start until November 1. There were 4 games played in the NHL, only 1 involving a New York Tri-State Area team:

* The New York Islanders lost to the defending Stanley Cup Champions, the Pittsburgh Penguins, 7-6 at the Nassau Coliseum. The Isles blew a 6-2 lead. Mario Lemieux scored a hat trick, and Phil Bourque scored the winning goal with 2:30 left in overtime.

* The Detroit Red Wings beat the Edmonton Oilers, 3-1 at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

* The St. Louis Blues beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 5-1 at the St. Louis Arena.

* And the Calgary Flames beat the Minnesota North Stars, 6-3 at the Saddledome in Calgary.

September 21, 1981: The 1st Female Justice On the U.S. Supreme Court

September 21, 1981: Sandra Day O'Connor is confirmed by a vote of the U.S. Senate for the Supreme Court of the United States. She becomes the Court's 1st female Justice.

Born in on March 26, 1930 in El Paso, Texas, she grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. Sandra entered Stanford University at only 16 years old, graduated at 20, and stayed there and got her law degree at 22. In 1969, she was elected to the Arizona State Senate, where she served until 1975, when she was appointed a Judge for Maricopa County, which includes the State capital of Phoenix. Her younger sister, Ann Day, would also be elected to the State Senate, serving from 1990 to 2000.

Sandra Day O'Connor served nearly 5 years as a County Judge, then nearly 2 years as a Judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals. She supported the Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, whose pre-politics life as a handsome actor convinced many women, who wouldn't otherwise think of voting for a Republican, to do so.

Reagan had seemed hostile to women's rights in America, including opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. But he had promised to appoint the 1st female Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, something no other major-party nominee, Democratic or Republican, had ever said he would do. He kept his word: When Potter Stewart retired, Reagan appointed O'Connor on July 7.

In his diary for the day before, Reagan wrote the following: "Called Judge O'Connor and told her she was my nominee for supreme court. Already the flak is starting and from my own supporters. Right to Life people say she is pro abortion. She declares abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she'll make a good justice." He believed she had sufficient judicial -- and conservative -- credentials.

Timing is often said to be everything, and Reagan would have appreciated that life was imitating art -- or, perhaps, the other way around. The film First Monday In October, the title based on the annual commencement of the term of the Supreme Court, had been finished before Reagan appointed O'Connor, and premiered on August 21.

Jill Clayburgh starred as Ruth Loomis, an archconservative judge from Orange County, California. In real life, it was the home County of former President Richard Nixon, and a stronghold for conservatives, to the point that the voters chose to name their airport after an actor even more conservative than Reagan: John Wayne.

In the film, Loomis is appointed and confirmed, and clashes with a liberal Justice, Daniel Snow, played by Walter Matthau, until a case comes up that suggests a conflict of interest between a case and the widowed Loomis' late husband. She offers to resign her seat, but Snow, having come to respect her, talks her out of it, because the legal ramifications of the case mean that both Justices' principles can be upheld.

If either O'Connor or Reagan was worried about the confirmation process, those worries soon dissolved. On September 12, the Senate's Committee on the Judiciary sent her nomination to the full Senate by a vote of 17-0, with 1 vote of "present." On September 21, she was confirmed by a vote of 99-0.

It is nearly impossible to get 99 U.S. Senators to agree on anything, but they agreed on her. The 1 Senator not voting for her was Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, who was unable to be present for the vote. When he got back to Washington, he personally apologized to her for not being able to vote for her.

O'Connor served 24 years, and was often a "swing vote" on the Court. Her vote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 upheld the right to reproductive freedom set forth in Roe v. Wade in 1973. But her vote in Bush v. Gore effectively canceled out every other vote in the 2000 Presidential election, and is a black mark on her record. She later wrote that she regretted that the Court heard the case at all, saying that it should have sent it back to the Supreme Court of the State of Florida, which had ruled the other way -- but she did not say that she regretted her final vote on the case.

Upon her retirement from the Court, President George W. Bush appointed Samuel Alito to her seat, which he still holds. She was named Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, succeeding former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. She held this post until 2012. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As of September 21, 2022, Sandra Day O'Connor is still alive, but has lived in an assisted-living facility since 2018, due to back problems and Alzheimer's disease, which also afflicted her husband, John O'Connor, also a lawyer. They had 3 children, all sons, none of them lawyers like their parents: Scott and Brian work in commercial real estate, while Jay is a software industry executive.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the 2nd female Justice on the Supreme Court, serving from 1993 until her death in 2020. There are now 4 female Justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Comey Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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September 21, 1981 was a Monday. On ABC Monday Night Football, the Dallas Cowboys beat the New England Patriots, 35-21 at what was then named Schaefer Stadium in the Boston suburb of Foxborough, Massachusetts.

And these Major League Baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians, 5-0 at Yankee Stadium. Rick Waits, a lefthander who always seemed to give the Yankees trouble, pitched a 6-hit shutout, beating Rudy May. Reggie Jackson went 0-for-3.

* The New York Mets beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-3 at Shea Stadium. With Brian Giles -- no relation to the later Pirates outfielder of the same name -- at bat, Mark Lee threw a wild pitch that allowed John Stearns to score the winning run in the bottom of the 13th inning. Willie Stargell appeared as a pinch-hitter, and drew a walk. And that wasn't even the longest game of the day:

* The Montreal Expos beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 1-0 in 17 innings at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Mike Schmidt went 2-for-5 with 5 walks. Pete Rose went 0-for-6 for the Phillies, and Tim Wallach did the same for the Expos. Steve Carlton and Ray Burris each pitched 10 shutout innings, to no avail. Andre Dawson singled home Rodney Scott with the winning run off Jerry Reed, to make a winning pitcher out of Bryn Smith.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Baltimore Orioles, 5-1 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Eddie Murray went 1-for-3 with a walk.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 9-3 at Fenway Park in Boston. Carl Yastrzemski of the Red Sox and Robin Yount of the Brewers each went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Paul Molitor was injured, and did not play for the Brewers.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Cubs, 2-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Joaquín Andújar pitched 8 innings of 3-hit shutout ball, and Bruce Sutter pitched a perfect 9th to end it.

* The Minnesota Twins beat the Kansas City Royals, 7-2 at Royals Stadium (now Kauffman Stadium) in Kansas City. George Brett went 1-for-5.

* The Texas Rangers beat the Seattle Mariners, 4-1 at Arlington Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas.

* The San Diego Padres beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-0 at Jack Murphy Stadium. Chris Welsh pitched a 3-hit shutout. Johnny Bench went 1-for-4.

* The California Angels beat the Chicago White Sox, 6-3 at Anaheim Stadium (now Angel Stadium of Anaheim). Rod Carew did not play.

* The Oakland Athletics and the Toronto Blue Jays got rained out at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader the next day. The A's swept, 3-2 and 4-2. In the opener, Keith Drumright singled home the winning run in the top of the 13th inning. Over the 2 games, Rickey Henderson went 2-for-7 with 4 walks, 4 stolen bases and an RBI, while Jim Spencer went 4-for-9 with a home run in the nightcap.

* And the Atlanta Braves, the Houston Astros, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, were not scheduled.