Election 2000: May It Please The Court

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We like to say we hate lawyers, that they pickle and fillet and jelly common sense until we're all flummoxed. For a while now, and particularly in the past few weeks, it has become fashionable to say that politics has been lawyered to death, that we face the cheerless prospect of election-by-lawsuit forever.

And we may, at least whenever elections are as close as this one. But there was a moment last week when nine lawyers, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, brightened rather than blanched American democracy, asking us to look beyond the merely dimpled. Friday was a day unlike any other since the election--unlike the past month of candidates with their dueling speeches and seas of American flags, of squawking pundits on the cable channels, certainly unlike the silly spectacle of the previous day, when news choppers chased a Ryder truck full of ballots as it trundled up a highway for eight hours. On Friday we saw how muscular reasoning can cut through the noise.

The moment probably won't last. The sleeper absentee-ballot lawsuit from Seminole County or Gore's unprecedented challenge to the presidential election results before Judge N. Sanders Sauls or some other court proceeding could end up determining the election's outcome. The U.S. Supreme Court may even decide not to rule at all on the case George W. Bush brought before them, Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board. But at least for 90 blessed minutes Friday morning, Election 2000 didn't feel like an argument between overheated parents at a Little League game.

Capitol Hill and the White House have their own institutionalized pageantry (think the State of the Union address), but when Dale Bosley, the marshal of the Supreme Court, came into the chamber on Friday to declare, "God save the United States and this honorable court," it was hard not to feel a little bit moved. At a time when presidential candidates buss their wives on TV and the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives don't speak for months at a time, the ringing proclamation of "Oyez, oyez, oyez" was exhilarating, a signal that the highest court in the land was about to turn its attention to our thorniest crisis.

True, the court's dignity has come at the price of its staggeringly anachronistic aloofness. When the court boldly thrust itself into the 20th century by allowing those newfangled audiotapes of Friday's session to be released the same day, it was praised as a step forward. But no other branch of government could get away with such operational opacity. Recently, when a member of the media suggested that the high court's public information office might notify reporters of schedules via e-mail, he was told that the computers in that office are not Internet enabled.