https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/ ... e-history/On April 4, the Washington Post ran a brief item in its “Daily 202” newsletter about the Gorsuch nomination that ended with a warning: “Don’t forget Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court — on a party-line vote — delivered the presidency to George W. Bush.” This one sentence neatly encapsulates the conventional view of Bush v. Gore. It’s also completely false. The media establishment has labored mightily for nearly two decades to make sure that what really happened never emerges to disturb the general view on the left that the election — like Justice Scalia’s Supreme Court seat — was stolen.
Articles, television programs, books, and films have cemented this narrative: that the Supreme Court, via a partisan 5–4 decision, simply selected our 43rd president. In reality, this portrayal of Bush v. Gore is far from the truth. The outcome hinged on an equal-protection argument that sprang directly from rulings issued by the Florida courts and was not an invention of the U.S. Supreme Court. Furthermore, seven of the nine justices agreed with it. And yet, almost nobody knows that Justices Breyer and Souter joined with the majority on the question of equal protection. Even fewer people know what actually happened in the courts in Florida.
The false narrative of Bush v. Gore is rooted in the media’s coverage of Election Night 2000. That night, journalists on every television network and cable channel repeatedly informed viewers that the polls were closed in Florida, even though the polls were in fact still open in the ten Panhandle counties in the Central Time Zone. By suppressing voter turnout in the Panhandle, the most conservative part of the state, during the final hour of the election, the press had a hand in instigating the five-week legal battle for the presidency that followed.
In the end, the winning equal-protection argument in Bush v. Gore was introduced into the litigation by a small group of disgruntled Panhandle voters, who testified in the circuit court in Tallahassee about being disenfranchised by the media on Election Night. These voters and their attorney have been virtually erased from history.
While the story of Election Night 2000 is one of voter suppression, the story of Bush v. Gore is one of censorship. And the most heavily censored elements occurred in the Tallahassee courtroom of Judge N. Sanders Sauls.
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