As a reporter, I covered lots of contested elections. And even though the Republican-dominated county I covered was famously corrupt, I never saw an election get stolen outright like I did with Bush v. Gore. In fact, the county judges pretty consistently applied the principle that votes were to be decided in light of the voter's clear intent. (I was shocked. Of course, they may have simply come up with more efficient and less public methods of stealing elections.)

I've never forgotten an interview with Al Gore in which he said he accepted the decision because to fight it, "that way lies revolution." And here we are, on the verge of a revolution anyway:

It's been ten years since the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, and everyone involved--especially the justices themselves--would like it to slip out of our collective memories. Brown v. Board of Education was cited 25 times in the decade after it was decided, Roe v. Wade 65 times. But not a single time has the court cited the ruling that ended the 2000 election. Justice Antonin Scalia frequently urges audiences to just "get over it."

Should we? No, Jeffrey Toobin writes at The New Yorker. Bush v. Gore was no novelty, despite the Court famously declaring it was a single-use decision. "What made the decision in Bush v. Gore so startling was that it was the work of Justices who were considered, to greater or lesser extents, judicial conservatives," Toobin writes. "On many occasions, these Justices had said that they believed in the preëminence of states’ rights, in a narrow conception of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and, above all, in judicial restraint. Bush v. Gore violated those principles."

The ruling's legacy of judicial activism is most clear, Toobin writes. "Judicial conservatism was once principally defined as a philosophy of deference to the democratically elected branches of government. But the signature of the Roberts Court has been its willingness, even its eagerness, to overturn the work of legislatures." The Roberts Court has struck down gun control laws across the country, gutted campaign-finance law, and will likely tackle Obama's health care law with "a similar lack of humility." Of course, many court cases are inherently political, Toobin says. "But the least we can expect from these men and women is that at politically charged moments—indeed, especially at those times—they apply the same principles that guide them in everyday cases. This, ultimately, is the tragedy of Bush v. Gore. The case didn’t just scar the Court’s record; it damaged the Court’s honor."