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SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR CHANGES HER MIND
By Mike Resnick
One vote, a single opinion, determined the next US president.
The closest presidential election in United States history occurred in the year 2000, between George W. Bush and Al Gore. At eleven p.m. Eastern, some networks projected that Bush was the winner. At two thirty a.m. Eastern, they changed that, either proclaiming Gore the winner or placing the race back in the undecided column. By four a.m. Eastern, the networks had agreed on only one thing: the race was too close to call.
Eventually it boiled down to the state of Florida. They counted, and recounted, and recounted again. When the dust cleared, Bush had a 327-vote lead. But Florida law gave Gore a chance to demand hand recounts in districts of his own choosing. Bush’s people went to court over that, and the Supreme Court ruled seven to two that Gore couldn’t cherry-pick the districts for a recount, that that put a different weight on votes from different districts.
Gore’s people sued again, Bush’s countersued, and the entire nation waited to find out who their next president would be. After the Supreme Court heard all the arguments, it decided five to four in Bush’s favor and Bush, the son of the forty-first president of the United States, became the forty-third.
Bush was very aware of his tissue-thin margin, and went out of his way to be conciliatory, even joining with Teddy Kennedy to push the “No Child Left Behind” act. He moved very carefully, very cautiously, for the first nine months of his term.
Then came September 11, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attempted destruction of the Pentagon, and the deaths of more than three thousand Americans as the US was invaded by a hostile power, one hardly anyone had heard of prior to that day.
Bush instantly mobilized the armed forces and prepared them for action, and indeed in a few months they invaded Afghanistan, destroyed Osama bin Laden’s headquarters, and defeated al-Qaeda. It was a quick, efficient operation with very few American casualties. The only negative was that bin Laden himself escaped and went into hiding, and for the rest of his presidency Bush had teams searching the Middle East, and the world, for him.
Then, little more than a year later, the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, and Israel, among others, believed that it was likely Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of nuclear weapons. After all, he was an avowed enemy of the United States, Bush’s father had already won a brief, humiliating war with him a dozen years earlier when he drove him out of Kuwait, and he had blocked inspection teams from doing their job. Since we now had a battle-hardened army, it made sense to invade and unseat Hussein and free his people from the yoke of tyranny before he could use those nukes on the United States.
Well, we won the war and executed Saddam, but to this day no one has found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were produced when we thought they were being made. For better or worse, our strife in the Middle East became George W. Bush’s lasting legacy.
But it became his legacy because of a single person. Which one? It had to be a Supreme Court justice, one of the five who ruled in favor of Bush over Gore.
What if Sandra Day O’Connor had changed her mind, if Clarence Thomas’s, Anthony Scalia’s, and William Rehnquist’s arguments hadn’t swayed her, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s had? There were tens of millions of votes cast, but that one single vote could have changed history.
Let us say that she did, indeed, change her vote, and Al Gore became our forty-third president.
Not much different would have happened at first. Wanting to get bin Laden since the early nineties, Gore would have been more receptive than Bush to warnings and plans to remove the al-Qaeda threat from Afghanistan upon entering office, but luck would have played a big role in getting the terrorist head, discovering the plan to attack America, and stopping the nineteen hijackers before the 9/11 attack was under way.
Perhaps.
More notably, Gore, a left-leaning liberal, would have been far less inclined to take on Iraq. He would have wanted to try diplomacy first, going to the UN for stiffer sanctions in retaliation for the regime’s continued flagrant peace treaty violations. Failing there, he would have likely returned to Clinton’s policy of cruise missile attacks and Persian Gulf naval patrols, limiting Iraq’s ability to make money off of black-market oil, continuing to kick the can down the road with containment strategies. It is therefore likely that Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime would still be in power today.
But as more people the world over are learning from ISIS every day, you cannot reason with committed fanatics. There would almost certainly have been more attacks, and when Gore finally yielded to public pressure to go after bin Laden, the situation in Iraq would have been placed on a back burner.
Gore would have tried for the kind of quick, clean, limited war that George H. W. Bush had fought against Iraq in 1991 . . . but Iraq was a country with definite boundaries and no allies (or at least none willing to go to war with the United States on Saddam’s behalf). Al-Qaeda had no national boundaries, and its leadership was in hiding, presumably (but not definitely) in the Middle East.
As this was going on, Gore would have latched on to the notion of global warming, a notion that was made to seem more likely than it actually was due to a number of alleged forged e-mails uncovered at the University of East Anglia and elsewhere. Believing in it totally, Gore might have begun investing huge amounts of federal funds in companies that were trying to capitalize on it.
Because he would have been publicly committed to the destruction of al-Qaeda, and because the economy wouldn’t start tanking for another couple of years, Gore would win a narrow reelection in 2004. Between the war and the huge push for alternate power sources, the economy would begin tanking in 2006, and Gore would spend his final two years trying to turn it around with eco-safe technology. When he left office in 2008, it would be generally acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was the most powerful military foe the United States had faced—and was still facing—since Adolf Hitler.
For want of a nail, a war was lost—and for want of one judge’s vote, another war was much further from victory than it might have been.