Recall that before rendering its decision the Court acted so precipitately to stop the count,
as Bush hero Justice Antonin Scalia helpfully explained, explicitly in order to insure public
ignorance of the genuine result. "Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe
for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires."

One aspect of the Court's controversial majority opinion dealt with the
validity of Florida's 110,000 "overvotes," where a machine count recorded
more than one vote for President. When examined by hand, many of these
votes turned out to be legal, since the punch card (or check mark) matched
the name of the candidate written in by the voter. The Gore team stupidly
ignored these votes, and the refusal of the Florida Supreme Court to
consider them (in favor of an "undervote only" count) was one reason given
by the Supreme Court for overturning that decision. So count the overvotes
and what happens? The final answer is not in yet, but it sure looks bad for Bush.

In late December, the Orlando Sentinel took a look at about 3,000 overvotes in
Lake County. They found more than 600 valid ballots that had been ignored by
the machines, with Gore picking up 130 even in this heavily pro-Bush county.
In late January the Chicago Tribune reported that in fifteen counties with a
particularly high rate of overvotes, more than 1,700 votes that showed a clear
choice had been discarded. Most of the counties in the Tribune's study were small,
rural and predominantly Republican. Yet even so, Gore's net gain was 366 votes.
And a Washington Post review of the computer records of 2.7 million votes in eight of
Florida's largest counties reported that overvotes trended toward Gore at a rate of three to one.

Undervotes tell the same story. A study by the Palm Beach Post of 4,513 of
that county's ballots set aside for possible court review indicates a Gore
pickup of 682 votes, surpassing Bush's alleged 537 statewide margin. These
patterns demonstrate that the Republicans' strong-arm tactics in Florida
made sense. Without them, their guy would be cutting brush back in Crawford.

Today, with the conspicuous exception of the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr., most of
the punditocracy appears to think it an act of bad sportsmanship to point out that the man
appointing far-right extremists to oversee the nation's legal system and its natural resources
s a pretender to the throne. Sam and Cokie mock the idea as a joke. George Will smirks,
"I don't think when the country hears media declaring Gore the winner they're impressed."

Perhaps the most instructive document of the "Get Over It" school of political science was
an angry TRB column in The New Republic penned by the magazine's former editor and
famed "gaycatholictory" Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan attacks writers he terms "the usual suspects"
for questioning the quality of Bush's mandate. Suspects include such distinguished scholars
and writers as Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, Yale law professor Jack Balkin,
New Yorker writer and successful former editor of The New Republic Hendrik Hertzberg
and TNR senior editor Jonathan Cohn (whose argument did not even appear in the magazine
until after Sullivan's attack on it). Each called upon the Democrats to resist Bush's extremist
tendencies, most notably the nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General.

Sullivan's ire is a bit puzzling. Leaving Florida aside, he is furious at folks opposing a potential
chief law enforcement officer who, as senator, refused to approve the ambassadorial nomination
of James Hormel because, like Sullivan, Hormel is gay--something Ashcroft believes is "a choice
which can be made and unmade." Now, personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, but I can hardly
imagine feeling such generosity should a President wish to turn over the legal system to a man who
happily discriminates against those of us who have made the "choice" to be, say, Jewish.

Sullivan argued that the rejection of Ashcroft would be "without precedent." In support of this
view and "as a testament to the level to which liberalism has now sunk," he quoted from a TRB
that appeared in 1925, "It is universally conceded the Executive has the right to select
his own official family, and their submission to the Senate is merely a form."

Leave aside the strange assertion that because somebody said something in TNR in 1925 it must
therefore be true seventy-six years later. (A year earlier the magazine had pronounced Pablo Picasso
"not a great painter or a great master of composition...and in no serious sense a thinker."
Does that make it so?) In any case, Sullivan should have kept on reading. The last time the Senate
decided to reject a nominee for Attorney General turns out to be--you guessed it--1925, and the
Republic somehow survived. Ashcroft should have been sent packing if only to insure that gays
who live and work in communities less tolerant than Sullivan's can practice their "choice"
unmolested by people like Ashcroft.

Eight Democrats may have lost their nerve this time, but the great thing about mistakes, I keep
telling my 2-year-old, is that you can learn from them. As the new Florida counts appear to
demonstrate even more clearly than before, George W. Bush and the Republicans hijacked
the 2000 election with the help of their discredited accomplices on the US Supreme Court.
They have no right to traditional forms of democratic deference, particularly when pursuing an
unpopular extremist agenda. An honest media ought do everything possible to insure that no one
loses sight of the astonishing circumstances through which Bush acceded to the presidency.
Get over that.