In the thread on the Supreme Court’s brief per curiam reversal in Brunner v. Ohio Republican Party, commenter Jacob Berlove comments:
I’m quite surprised. I understand that recent case law seems to weigh against these kind of suits, but I thought that the per curiam opinion in Bush V. Gore stood for the propostition that the usual rules about applying case law can be reversed if necessary in cases like these. . . . I guess the difference here is that the stay issued is so unlikely to affect the outcome of this action that Justice Kennedy (I single him out because he is the only remaining justice from the Bush court that signed onto the per curiam and not the concurrence) et al determined it wasn’t worth applying the law specially in this case.
I strongly disagree. The reason the Supreme Court intervened in Bush v. Gore was because the Florida state courts were trying to interfere with the election. In particular, the Florida Supreme Court was trying to run the recount: It came up with its own procedures and imposed them on the state executive branch. The Supreme Court intervened to stop the Florida court’s shenanigans. (To be clear, I think the Supreme Court did so improperly, and in doing so it engaged in shenanigans of its own. But that’s what the Court was trying to do.)
That role is consistent with the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Sixth Circuit today. The district court’s order was a lot like the Florida Supreme Court’s order on the road to Bush v. Gore: It essentially took over the state executive branch and ordered the election to proceed as the judge insisted. The Supreme Court’s reversal is consistent with Bush v. Gore in the sense that it stops courts from interfering in the election. When elections are close, or a winner must be named in a recount, courts should stay out and let the state election boards function without judicial inteference. Of course, there was a lot more going on in both cases, but I do see a consistency between what the Court did in Bush v. Gore and what the Court did today.