Court Provides Clues to Possible Rulings
W A S H I N G T O N, Dec. 11 -- How will the U.S. Supreme Court rule in Bush vs. Gore? The answer may lie in the justices’ questions.
The presidential election controversy has been anything but predictable, and trying to guess how the secretive Supreme Court will rule in any case is a perilous undertaking. “Questions can be a lot of things,” says ABCNEWS legal analyst Jack Ford. “Questions can be actually a statement from a justice … or it could be a genuine question.”
But as lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore made their cases for and against manual ballot recounts today, several of the nine justices offered a hint of the how the high court might rule.
If You Ain’t Got That Swing …
Judging from the questions thrown at Bush attorney Theodore Olson and Gore lawyer David Boies by the justices, ABCNEWS political analyst George Stephanopoulos says there is a strong possibility the court may issue a narrow ruling in favor of the Texas governor.
“It sounded like there was very little evidence that anybody was about to switch sides,” says Stephanopoulos, noting the court voted 5-4 on Saturday to halt the recounts ordered by the Florida high court from going forward. “Particularly Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor — she was very critical of the Florida Supreme Court from the bench.”
O’Connor, who sided with her more conservative colleagues when she joined the majority in granting the emergency stay sought by the Bush campaign, is considered one of the court’s swing votes, along with Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Many legal experts said Gore’s best chance of winning the historic case was to persuade O’Connor or Kennedy to join with the four more liberal to moderate justices who dissented from the court’s decision to bar the recounts from going forward.
But ABCNEWS legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says both justices appeared “troubled” by the question of whether the Florida Supreme Court usurped the role of the state Legislature when it ordered a new recount to commence.
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