Jonathan Chait (sub. req’d.) notes that a lot of conservatives have turned on Katherine Harris, some of them going so far as to question her intelligence and even sanity. Shouldn’t this change of heart make conservatives re-evaluate the 2000 post-election drama, too?

[T]he bedrock assumption of the conservative interpretation of Florida is that Harris is a sober, competent, and upstanding public servant. If you assume that Harris is none of those things, then the whole denouement of 2000–and, by extension, the very legitimacy of Bush’s presidency–takes on a strikingly different cast.
What do you say, conservatives? Now that some of you are willing to contemplate that Bush has been a disappointment–or even a disaster–is it too much to consider the possibility that he never should have become president in the first place?

Conservatives should consider that possibility, but then probably reject it. I didn’t know anything about Harris at the start of Nov. 2000, and I trust that my colleagues didn’t either. Our articles and editorials on the Florida fight did not rely on the premise that Harris was an ideal public official; they rested on arguments that her decisions were correct applications of the law, and applauded her for having reached the right decisions. My own confidence that she made the right calls is not diminished, as Chait seems to think it should be, by the fact that a majority of the Florida Supreme Court disagreed with her (in fairly weak decisions that the Supreme Court of the United States in turn rebuked).

All that said, I’ve never been a fan of Bush v. Gore. I find the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas concurrence persuasive about the constitutional violations that were being committed, but think that the Constitution contained non-judicial remedies for these violations. Either the state legislature or the Congress should have had to deal with them. That would have resulted, almost certainly, in Bush’s becoming president, albeit after suffering some political damage.