The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision to block further recounts of Florida's ballots deeply fractured the court - precisely the outcome the justices themselves had hoped to avoid.
The five justices in the majority cast their opinion as a necessary duty that they were reluctantly being forced to undertake. Several of the justices in the minority responded with language that stopped just short of calling their colleagues hypocrites. They accused the majority of departing from longstanding rules and of aggressively reaching out to decide an issue the court should have left to Congress and the state courts to resolve.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, for example, referred to the case as "a self-inflicted wound - a wound that may harm not just the court but the nation".
Justice John Paul Stevens sounded a similar note: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
Justice David H. Souter was more restrained but no less firm. The court, he said, should simply have stayed out of the case. "There is no justification for denying the state the opportunity to try to count all disputed ballots now," he wrote.
At the core of the case was whether the recounts ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated the constitution's guarantee that all citizens will be treated equally under the law. In the eyes of the majority, the state court violated that constitutional guarantee by establishing a recount procedure that lacked adequate standards for determining whether a voter really intended to cast a ballot.
The majority's unsigned, or per curiam, opinion indicated that Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy might have been willing to allow the Florida courts to fix the recount procedure had there been enough time. But, the opinion said, the counting needed to be completed by Tuesday. "That date is upon us, and there is no recount procedure in place under the state Supreme Court's order that comports with minimal constitutional standards."
Three other members of the majority - Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - went further. In their view, the Florida Supreme Court erred in thinking that the undervotes - votes not counted by voting machines - should be tabulated at all. "In precincts using punchcard ballots voters are instructed to punch out the ballot cleanly," they added. Where a voter fails to do so, the ballots should simply be discarded.
In the eyes of the dissenting justices, those arguments were not just wrong but almost illegitimate. "The political implications of this case for the country are momentous," Justice Breyer wrote in his dissent, which was joined in part by each of the other four dissenters. "In a system that allows counties to use different types of voting systems, voters already arrive at the polls with an unequal chance that their votes will be counted," he wrote.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, wrote that while the Florida recount may have been less than perfect "we live in an imperfect world, one in which thousands of votes have not been counted". She took particular offence at the fact that Chief Justice Rehnquist cited several civil rights cases from the 1960s as examples of instances in which the Supreme Court had overturned state court interpretations of state laws.
In those cases, she noted, the US Supreme Court had been forced to intervene to protect black citizens. The Florida Supreme Court "surely should not be bracketed with state high courts of the Jim Crow South", she wrote.