Were There Adequate State Grounds in Bush v. Gore?
Few Supreme Court decisions provoke the immediate and intensely negative verdict that law professors passed on Bush v. Gore. Some of the criticism is deserved. Others have questioned whether the ruling rests on any general principle at all, given the care the Court took to limit its reasoning to the extraordinary circumstances of the Florida presidential election. It is all too easy to leap from this well-founded critique of the Court’s reasoning to the conclusion that the majority – all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents – were bent on installing George W. Bush in the White House by any means they could find, and that the holding rests not at all on law but solely on naked politics. Putting aside the majority’s reasoning, a better ground on which to defend Bush is that the Florida Supreme Court (the “Florida Court”) violated article II, § 1, clause 2 of the Constitution, which provides that “[e]ach state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct,
