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By Root 8431 0

stars—garish touches that made the office a sort of comic tourist attraction for law clerks and other insiders. All of the justices had the right to borrow paintings from the National Gallery, but Kennedy had taken the fullest advantage, plucking several near-masterpieces from the collection. What was more, he wedged his desk into the far corner of his office, away from the door, so that visitors had to traverse the expanse of his room to shake his hand. It was an office that tried hard, maybe too hard, to impress. (Kennedy even labored on his magnificent view of the east front of the Capitol. When Congress announced plans to build a massive visitors’ center between the Court and the Capitol, Kennedy took the lead in lobbying the legislators to make sure it was built entirely belowground, so as not to disrupt the vista. The negotiations turned out to be surprisingly complex, and lasted for years, but Kennedy won this battle, and the view from the Court was largely preserved.)

The first Kennedy memo to his colleagues about the legal machinations in Florida was followed by a second, then another. He was almost providing a legal play-by-play. His hunger for the case was palpable.

Once the Bush lawyers failed in their effort to have the federal court shut down all the recounts at once, they tried to do it one county at a time. By now, both sides had become familiar with the iron law of recounts: the trailing candidate tries to open up the process and recount as many votes as possible in as many places as possible; the leading candidate does just the opposite, fighting to limit the number and locations of any recounts. This wasn’t high principle, just political warfare by other means.

The Gore forces had one principal advantage—Florida law—and one major disadvantage—Katherine Harris—in their fight for recounts. State law had a strong presumption in favor of allowing recounts to reach accurate results. As for Harris, she occupied the previously obscure position of secretary of state. An heiress to a real estate fortune, she had an imperious manner and big ambitions. She had vaulted quickly from the state senate to statewide office and had plans to move up the Republican hierarchy. Earlier in the year, she had traveled to New Hampshire to campaign for George W. Bush and later served as cochair of his campaign in Florida. Like many secretaries of state around the country, Harris was both a partisan elected official and the ostensibly neutral arbiter of elections in the state.

Immediately after Election Day, the Bush team placed one of its most trusted legal advisers in Florida, Mac Stipanovich, as its representative in Harris’s office. She made no decisions in this period without consulting him. The most important issue for her to decide concerned the recounts. Could the recounts continue longer than seven days after the election, that is, past Tuesday, November 14? The law said both that Harris should certify by the seventh day and that she could also allow recounts to proceed longer. Of course, she did not. If the counties weren’t done by then (and three of the four were not finished by then), too bad for them—and Al Gore. But then on Friday, November 17, the Florida Supreme Court, on its own initiative, stepped into the fray to overrule Harris and say that the counties could continue counting votes. The justices of that court scheduled a full argument in the case for Monday, November 20, but in the meantime they ordered the recounts to proceed.

By Monday, Bush’s margin in Florida had grown from 300 to 930 votes. (Volusia County had completed its recount, with a net gain of 27 votes for Gore, and the counting of overseas absentee ballots had netted 630 votes for Bush.) The issue before the Florida Supreme Court was whether the recounts in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade would be allowed to proceed. If the Florida Supreme Court stopped those recounts, there was no way that Gore could win.

By 2000, the state supreme court represented a singular part of Florida government. Florida had a Republican governor, Jeb Bush,