Politics: Supreme Court not deciding this election?

Dahlia Lithwick makes a compelling argument for why the Supreme Court might not take appeals to decide the election:

But don't be so quick to assume that the high court would hear another election appeal. There's little doubt in my mind that each of the 20,000 lawyers poised to jet around the country next week like a small air force of flying monkeys in ties expects to take their appeals all the way to the Supreme Court. But there's also little doubt in my mind that the court will refuse to take them. Let's recall, first of all, that the court has absolute and ultimate control over its own docket. But more profoundly, let's recall that the court has absolute and ultimate control over its own reputation and legitimacy. No one was more shocked than the justices by the angry blowback from Bush v. Gore. And no one is less interested than the justices in replaying that psychodrama again this year, and every four years hereafter.

In a terrific piece in the Washington Post this weekend, Professor Garrett Epps explains why Bush v. Kerry shouldn't happen again next month. The truth, he says, is that Bush v. Gore never needed to happen in the first place. Perfectly adequate political processes were already in place to decide the last election, he argues, and had the court simply butted out, George W. Bush would have been installed by the Florida Legislature—with or without the kindly assistance of the House of Representatives. Ultimately, those entities would have been held accountable to the voters for that result because those entities are accountable to the voters in the first place. The fact that the Supreme Court made itself accountable was a disaster, according to Epps. The fact that a large part of the American public still resents them has not been lost on the justices.