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At the same moment in the nearby Senate Dining Room, Cheney was getting a very different reception from the Republican Conference. There the talk was all about transition, governance and the legislative agenda — divvying up the spoils of victory. Alaska senator Frank Murkowski wanted to know when Bush and Cheney would roll back Clinton executive orders banning oil and natural-gas drilling on public lands. (Cheney told Murkowski to send him a memo.) Strom Thurmond, who turned 98 that day, danced a little jig to demonstrate that he had no intention of going anywhere. Both sides were focused on the power-sharing issues that sprang from the 50-50 tie in the Senate — an even split that assumed, of course, that Bush would defeat Gore, keeping Lieberman in the Senate as the 50th Democratic vote, with Cheney the Republican tie breaker. The even split gave moderates hope that they alone would hold the key to the President's legislative success. At times last week, it seemed there were more moderate groups meeting on Capitol Hill — the Wednesday Group, two Centrist Coalitions, assorted convocations of New Democrats — than there are bridge clubs in Palm Beach. Now all that has to be put on hold while the politicians wait to hear from the judges. "Until this is settled, nobody is going to be talking about any specific agenda," says an aide to a moderate Republican senator. "This trumps any bill." The healing will have to wait.
By Saturday morning, with the votes being counted by order of the state supreme court, Bush's directive about softening the rhetoric had been rendered inoperative. Tom DeLay, the resident House GOP firebrand, had vowed the night before that "this judicial aggression will not stand." His operatives were in Florida, officially to observe the recount process, and House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt warned them not to "disrupt this count." But there were plenty of other disruptions.
The state supreme court's ruling was extraordinarily ambitious, imposing a remedy no one had asked for. Gore's lawyers simply wanted a recount of 14,000 disputed ballots in two Democratic counties; the state supreme court ordered a recount of undervotes in 64 of 67 counties (three had already completed recounts). Earlier in the process, such a sweeping ruling might have seemed downright Solomonic — counting the undervotes everywhere removed the built-in Gore advantage of counting just three Democratic strongholds. But after almost five weeks of wrangling, with the hunger for finality beginning to crowd out the desire for fairness in all but the most devoted Gore partisans, the plan mostly seemed mind-boggling. In fact, the recounts proceeded smartly, and in many places, Judge Terry Lewis's informal Sunday afternoon deadline would have been met. Nobody could say with certainty who would win the recount, but since most of the undervotes came from Democratic precincts with large African-American populations and outdated voting machines, Gore's chances seemed good — and so Bush's lawyers did everything in their power to shut down the recount.
At first one wondered if Florida's dysfunctional political-and-judicial world would manage to get it going in the first place. The state supreme court directed Judge Sauls — whose ruling they had just trashed — to oversee the recount, but Sauls, perhaps smarting from press reports about his previous battles with the high court, perhaps just not wanting to do its bidding, recused himself. A second judge, Nikki Clark, declared herself unavailable. So the job fell to Judge Lewis, the level-headed, mustachioed novelist-jurist who had disappointed the Gore team with his ruling four weeks ago backing Secretary of State Katherine Harris. On Friday night, when Lewis held a preliminary hearing to set a timetable for the recount, Bush lawyer Phil Beck staged a remarkable filibuster, a meandering, hourlong statement that seemed designed to delay the counting for just as long as Beck could string sentences together. Beck, the Bush team's lead trial lawyer, sensibly pushed Lewis to define the terms of the hand count — dimples, no; hanging chads, yes? But the judge declined, leaving the issue to the discretion of the local counters, and the Bush lawyers to complain, with justification, that this was a recount without standards. Beck also deserves credit for adding another fine term to the Election 2000 lexicon. He repeatedly objected to a manual recount in Miami-Dade because of his worries about the "spoliation" of the ballots. (Spoliate, from the early 18th century, means to plunder in war and to injure beyond reclamation.) Lewis told Beck to put his objections in writing.