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Joe Biden speaks in Wilmington, Delaware, about the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, June 30, 2020.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

Joe Biden was one of the youngest people to be elected to the Senate and is one of the oldest to run for president.

Biden served eight years as President Barack Obama's vice president but decided not to seek the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential nomination. That decision cleared the way for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to run in the election, which ended in a shocking upset by then-novice politician Donald Trump.

The former vice president balked again at seeking the 2020 nomination but announced his candidacy on April 25, 2019, at age 76, despite his personal concerns about his age and the effect of a presidential run on his family. He said one major motivation was Trump's declaration after the deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that there were "very fine people on both sides."

"With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and thosewith the courage to stand against it,"Biden said in a 3-minute video announcing his candidacy."At that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime. ... We are in the battle for the soul of this nation."

So now, the quintessential D.C. insider is trying to dislodge the incomparable outsider from the White House. It's the third time he has run for president, stumbling in bids for the nomination in 1988 and 2008.

For a profile of President Donald Trump, see: How President Donald Trump got to Election Day in a turbulent 2020

Biden was on the mat in the first two 2020 nominating contests, with poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, finishing in fourth place in the former and picking up zero delegates in the latter. He was in such bad shape that he left the Granite State even before the polls closed on Feb. 11 and raced to his do-or-die state, South Carolina, which voted 18 days later.

Picking up the crucial endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state's most powerful Democrat and the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, Biden won the first presidential primary of his life. He crushed the field of seven candidates, winning 48% of the vote, with the runner-up, Sen. Bernie Sanders, winning 20%. Biden wound up sweeping all but eight states in the primaries and caucuses.

Days before the Democratic National Convention, Biden selected as his vice presidential candidate one of his primary opponents, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, despite her evisceration of him in the first Democratic debate for his opposition to busingduring the 1970s and '80s. She is the first woman of color to be chosen for a major party ticket.

"I need someone working alongside me who is smart, tough, and ready to lead. Kamala is that person," Biden said. "I need someone who understands the pain that so many people in our nation are suffering. Whether they've lost their job, their business, a loved one to this virus. ... This president says he 'doesn't want to be distracted by it.' ... If we're going to get through these crises we need to come together and unite for a better America. Kamala gets that."

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was bornNov. 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children of Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden and Biden Sr. The elder Bidenworked as a furnace cleaner and used-car salesman. In a search of a better job, he moved the family to Delaware when Joe Jr. was 10.

As a boy, Biden had to fight taunts from classmates because he stuttered.

After graduating from the University of Delaware, Biden married Neilia Hunter in August 1966 and graduated from Syracuse University Law School two years later. The Bidens moved to Claymont, Delaware, where he began practicing law and was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1969.

Two years later, at age 29, he won a stunning upset in a U.S. Senate race, defeating two-term Republican J. Caleb Boggs, who also had served two terms in the House and two terms as governor. Six weeks after that triumph, while Biden went to Washington to check out his new office, his wife took their two young sons and year-old daughter to shop for a Christmas tree. The car she was driving was involved in a crash with a tractor-trailer. Neilia and their daughter, Naomi, were killed, and sons Beau, 3, and 2-year-old Hunter were seriously injured.

Then Sen.-elect Joseph Biden swears to his U.S. citizenship at the office of the Secretary of the Senate. Biden, who just turned 30 at the time, became the youngest Senator in the 93rd Congress on Jan. 3, 1973. Left is William Ridgely, Senate financial officer, and center is Frank Valeo, secretary of the Senate.

Bettmann | Getty Images

Biden considered giving up the Senate seat but decided otherwise. He was sworn in on Jan. 5, 1973, in a chapel at the Wilmington Medical Center, where Beau and Hunter were treated. Just six weeks before the small ceremony, Biden had turned 30, the minimum age to serve in the upper chamber.

"One of my earliest memories was being in that hospital, my Dad always at our side. We, my brother and I, not the Senate, were all he cared about," Beau Biden recalled at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. "He decided not to take the oath of office. He said then, 'Delaware can always get another senator, but my boys can't get another father.' However, great men, great men like Ted Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey men who had been tested in their own right convinced him to serve. He was sworn in at the hospital, at my bedside."

Thus began Biden's 36 years in the Senate. Rather than moving to Washington, he commuted by Amtrak four hours a day for the 110-mile trip from Wilmington to the nation's capital, so he could be with his sons in Delaware.

It was a tradition he kept for his entire career on Capitol Hill. Four years into his first term, Biden married Jill Jacobs Stevenson, a teacher he had met on a blind date. She became the stepmother of Biden's sons and in 1981 the mother of the couple's daughter, Ashley.

Joe Biden greets his wife, Jill, on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention from the Chase Center on August 20, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware.

Win McNamee | Getty Images

In the Senate, Biden became chairman of the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees.

In the mid-1970s, he was a leading opponent of using busing against racial segregation of schools in Northern states such as Delaware, aligning himself with Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. His stance came back to haunt him during a 2019 presidential debate, when Harris attacked him for working with segregationists.

"There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day," she said. "And that little girl was me."

Staggered, Biden said it was a "mischaracterization" of his position."What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education," he said.

Biden was floor manager of the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which toughened penalties for criminals. As Judiciary Committee chairman, he helped draft the1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which expanded the federal death penalty, banned assault weapons and provided for harsher standards for crack cocaine violations than for powdered forms of the drug. The crack provisions disproportionately affected Black people. In early 2019, three months before launching his presidential campaign, Biden called his role in backing the anti-crime measures "a big mistake."

In another move he came to regret, Biden led the interrogation of Anita Hill at the Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice in 1991.

Then-Sen. Joseph Biden holds up the book "Order and Law" by Charles Fried during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

Wally McNamee | Corbis Historical | Getty Images

A reluctant witness, Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her when he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Biden blocked other witnesses who were ready to testify to the all-male committee in support of Hill. Biden said he didn't want to violate Thomas' privacy but went on to vote in the minority against the nomination.

Onthe first day of Biden's 2020 presidential bid, his campaign officials disclosed that during a recent phone call with Hill, the former vice president had expressed "his regret for what she endured"three decades earlier. Hill, a law professor at Brandeis University, told The New York Times she found the conversation unsatisfying, but she eventually endorsed Biden over Trump,"notwithstanding all of his limitations in the past."

"I believed her story from the very beginning," Biden told CNN last July. "I wish I could have protected her more. ...I wish I could have done it differently under the rules.But when it ended, I was determined to do two things. One, make sure never again would there not be women on the committee. ... And I was determined to continue and finish writing and passing the Violence Against Women Act." He did co-sponsor that legislation, which became law in 1994 as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

On the Foreign Relations Committee, Biden voted against authorizing the Gulf War in 1991 after Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The same year, Biden was among the first to call for arming Bosnian Muslims and allowing NATO airstrikes against Serb forces in the Balkan War. Eight years later, Biden backed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and co-sponsored legislation with Republican Sen. John McCain that called on President Bill Clinton to use force against Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic for atrocities in the Kosovo War.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the U.S. military action against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Biden was an early supporter of a continued U.S. military peacekeeping presence in the Central Asian country, where the al-Qaeda plotters of 9/11 had been based. "Whatever it takes, we should do it," Biden said in February 2002. "History will judge us harshly if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we failed to stay the course."

During the tensions ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden helped draft a resolution that gave President George W. Bush the authority to use military force as a last resort against Saddam's purported program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Biden's 1988 presidential campaign lasted less than three months, flaming out after he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during a debate at the 1987 Iowa State Fair.

It wasn't the last time Biden put his foot in his mouth. In 2006, two years after announcing his intention to run for president again, Biden rambled seemingly endlesslyduring the confirmation hearing for then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito Jr. The senator managed to ask only five questions in his allotted 30 minutes.

"He has much to say and then too much to add," The Washington Post's Richard Cohen said in a column the next day. "He is an anatomical disaster. His Achilles' heel is his mouth."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Biden touted his foreign policy credentials, but that bid also fizzled, again because of remarks he made, starting on Day One of his candidacy.

In an interview published that day, Jan. 31, 2007, in The New York Observer, Biden described then-Sen. Obama's historic presidential bid. "I mean you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said.

Obama at first brushed it off, saying he didn't think Biden "intended to offend," but he later took issue with the remarks. "Obviously they were historically inaccurate," Obama said. "African American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate."

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden wave during the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sept. 6, 2012.

Tom Pennington | Getty Images

Nearly a year later, Biden dropped out of the race.Luckily for him, Obama took the high road and named him his running mate in the 2008 campaign, selecting the Irish American senator a member of the "sensible center of the Democratic Party," as it was known for his popularity with blue-collar voters and for his expertise in national security.

Even during Biden's successful bid for the 2020 nomination, his mouth got him in trouble. Three days before the police killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day, Biden apologized within hours of making a racially insensitive statement on "The Breakfast Club," a podcastpopular with Black millennials. "If you've got a problem figuring out whether you're for me or for Trump, then you ain't Black," he said.

The comment shook and angered Black voters. Only 2 months earlier, African American voters in South Carolina had saved the presidential bid for the man who was vice president to the nation's first Black president.

The Obama administration began with the country struggling to pull out of the Great Recession. Biden helped get support for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, then was placed in charge of oversight for the $787 billion package, which included income and unemployment subsidies, tax cuts and funds for "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects. The New York Times in May 2020 called Biden's oversight role "perhaps the most significant ... assignment of his time in office."

In a 2010 report, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office credited the act for raising real gross domestic product by between 1.7% and 4.5%, lowering the unemployment rate by between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points and increasing the number of full-time jobs by a range of 2 million to 4.8 million. Republicans, however, criticized it. A report by McCain and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., targeted 100 projects that received funds, including $555,000 for new windows for a closed visitor's center at Mount St. Helens and $762,000 for a computerized dance program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

But Biden's across-the-aisle talents were used to win deals with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to avoid falling off the "fiscal cliff" during standoffs in 2011 and 2012 over the federal deficit and debt. Their agreement in 2012 led to the American Taxpayer Relief Act of that year, which made permanent many of the tax cuts enacted under the George W. Bush administration.

While Biden was Obama's vice president, the "Joe bombs" continued. During the swine flu outbreak in 2009, he got in trouble with his boss by saying he would advise his family to avoid travel on public transit or planes, eliciting a clarification from the White House. In May 2012, his statement that he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriage was a clearer endorsement than Obama's self-described "evolving" position on the issue. Biden apologized to Obama privately, but the president later moved to clearly advocate for same-sex marriage.

Biden made numerous visits to U.S. troops in Iraq and supported NATO's military intervention in Libya during the demise of Moammar Gadhafi's regime and the dictator's assassination. He argued, unsuccessfully, against then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's call for sending 21,000 more troops to the war in Afghanistan in 2009.

"The best thing about Joe is that when we get everybody together, he really forces people to think and defend their positions, to look at things from every angle, and that is very valuable for me," Obama said in a statement later that year to Politico. "I also know, when he gives me his advice, he gives it to me straight."

Biden's hopes for the White House were derailed in 2015, this time by another family tragedy. His son Beau, who had served in Iraq and as Delaware attorney general and had been a front-runner in the race for governor, died of brain cancer on May 30, 2015. He was 46. Five months later, Biden announced in the White House Rose Garden that he was taking himself out of the 2016 presidential race.

Then-vice presidential nominee Joe Biden and son Beau acknowledge the crowd at the Democratic National Convention, August 27, 2008 in Denver.

Mark Wilson | Getty Images

"As the family and I have worked through the the grieving process, I've said all along what I've said time and again to others: that it may very well be that that process, by the time we get through it, closes the window on mounting a realistic campaign for president. That it might close," Biden said. "I've concluded it has closed."

Before Biden reopened that window more than four years later, Trump considered him such a threat that he pressured the head of a foreign country President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden's appointment to the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

According to an unfounded conspiracy theory, then-Vice President Biden sought to withhold loan guarantees to Ukraine to pressure its government to fire a prosecutor in order to protect Hunter in a corruption investigation of Burisma. However, the call for the removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor was supported by Republicans and Democrats and by major U.S. allies because he was considered soft on corruption.

Trump's call to Zelenskiy became the basis of the impeachment trial that ended in his acquittal by the Republican-led Senate. Biden always stood by Hunter, although he and his son conceded that Hunter could have exercised better judgment in joining the Burisma board.

"Look, my son did nothing wrong at Burisma," Biden said during the first election debate against Trump. "This is not about my family or his family, this is about your family the American people."

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How Joe Biden got to the threshold of the presidency - CNBC

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On December 9, 2000, 32 days after Americans cast their vote in that years election, Ron Klain allowed himself to believe for a moment that Al Gore might actually become president. Klain was overseeing the legal effort to contest the disputed result in Florida, that years decisive state, where George W. Bush held a lead of just 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast. Bush had already been officially certified the winner by the secretary of State, a loyal Republican, but the day before, in a shocking 4-3 decision, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount.

That morning, a Saturday, the counting got started. All around the state, under the watch of news cameras, election officials visually examined thousands of ballots that, for one technical reason or another, had not registered a vote for president that could be picked up by a machine. There were valid votes in there, and Klain believed Gore was picking up ground fast.

Around lunchtime, as Klain was briefing Gore from his war room in Tallahassee, a call came in on another line. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court of the United States had issued an emergency order stopping the recount until it heard the case of Bush v. Gore. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said that continuing the count threatened irreparable harm to Bush by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election. There would be a big Supreme Court argument, but it was irrelevant. Gore lost the presidency the day the Supreme Court stopped the count. Klain knew it. Gore knew it. How would Gore react?

Gore picked up his favorite new toy, a technological gizmo called a Blackberry, which he used to send out emails under a pseudonym, Robert Stone. Gore tapped out a message to staffers:

PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT NO ONE TRASHES THE SUPREME COURT.

The past is a foreign country, goes the famous opening line to L.P. Hartleys novel The Go-Between, they do things differently there. I have spent this campaign season writing a history of the 2000 election year, hearing the eerie resonances and jarring dissonances. At the time it was happening, the disputed result was considered to be the messiest, most litigious, and most destabilizing outcome imaginable a stress test the nation passed because, after a long and determined legal fight, the loser declined to challenge the authority of American institutions and conceded.

Like I said, a foreign country.

But there are lessons from 2000 that can be applied to the present unfolding electoral events, ones that will likely shape the legal strategies of both campaigns, in part because many of the same characters are still involved. Klain, of course, is now a top Joe Biden adviser. The Bush effort was a proving ground for an entire generation of Republican legal talent, some of whom have served in the Trump administration, including Noel Francisco, the former solicitor general; Alex Azar, the current secretary of Health and Human Services; some of whom are now in politics, such as Senator Ted Cruz; and three of whom are now on the Supreme Court: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

So, what can the precedent of 2000 tell us about how a 2020 legal endgame might play out?

First of all, lets start with an obvious difference. At least at this moment and hey, it could change by the time I finish writing this paragraph Biden has narrow leads in enough states to give him a very narrow majority of the Electoral College. That matters a great deal. That means Trump is Gore: a candidate seeking to find enough votes to close a narrow gap.

Whats more, Trump faces slender deficits in two states Nevada and Arizona as opposed to just one, as in the case of 2000. (In fact, New Mexicos margin was even closer than Floridas, so close that it appeared for a moment it might be a tie, which would have triggered an obscure and I am not making this up! provision in the state constitution that would have called for the election to be decided by a card game. In the end Gore won by four votes and Bush chose not to challenge it because it would not affect the outcome in the Electoral College.) Complicating Trumps task even further, he also faces dwindling leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia, placing him in the awkward position of having to play both offense and defense in different states.

If one legal battle for the presidency threw Americas democratic system into cardiac arrest in 2000, it is staggering to imagine what four separate legal battles for the presidency might do in 2020.

On the bright side, at least the campaigns were prepared this time. In 2000, everyone expected a close election, but the idea that litigation and ultimately the Supreme Court might end up determining the outcome was inconceivable, at least in the beginning. Both candidates were prepared to accept a defeat. Early on Election Day, Bush received a set of exit polls that suggested incorrectly that Gore would handily win Florida, and thus the presidency. He told his daughters it might be an unhappy night. Later in the evening, based in part on the faulty exit-poll data, the TV networks called Florida for Gore. Bush left a family dinner at a restaurant in Austin and rode back to the Texas governors mansion with his wife, Laura, in silence. There isnt much to say when you lose, he later wrote in his biography, Decision Points. He wasnt happy but he was ready to concede.

Then, a few hours later, the projection for Gore was reversed. At 2:16 a.m. on the morning after the election, the TV networks projected that Bush would be the winner in Florida, and thus the next president. Gore absorbed the news without question without even phoning his own campaign field staff, which thought the race was still too close to call and called Bush to concede in a dignified fashion. Then, in one of the famously weird scenes in American political history, Gores staff managed to get word of the dwindling margin to him just as he was about to take the stage to give a concession speech. Gore called Bush back, and retracted his concession. But the political damage was done. Most Americans had gone to sleep thinking Gore had lost.

Suffice it to say, no one is going to concede this election for the sake of dignity.

There is absolutely no doubt that, had the will of every person who set out to vote in Florida been counted, Gore and his running mate, Joe Lieberman, would have won the election. Among other things, many thousands of Black voters were disenfranchised before the election, due to an error-filled purge of supposed felons from the registration rolls, and after the election, by a confusingly designed ballot used in Duval County, around Jacksonville. (He also won the national popular vote, but of course, that doesnt matter.) But the concession had lasting political and legal consequences. From the moment the networks declared Bush president, he retained the presumption of victory, and it was Gores job to sow uncertainty about the result.

This made him deeply uncomfortable. He was highly conscious of the opinion, widely held among Democratic leaders in Washington and opinion-makers in the media, that he could not appear to be a spoiler. He was concerned about his ability to govern the country. He did not want to create chaos. When the Reverend Jesse Jackson went down to Palm Beach County to mount a street protest over disenfranchisement, Gore asked his campaign manager, Donna Brazile, a protge of Jacksons, to call him up and tell him to lower the temperature. Meanwhile, Republican operatives including, at least in some mysterious capacity, Trumps now-convicted trickster pal Roger Stone stirred up unruly street protests in Miami, where there was vociferous anti-Gore sentiment in the Cuban-American community. (Plus a change.)

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The legal consequences of the Gore concession were more subtle. It placed obscure state court judges in the position of having to decide whether to overturn an apparent presidential election result. Understandably, none of them were prepared to take on that kind of responsibility. And the concession also set an artificial clock, of sorts, in the minds of Gore and his advisers a notion that there was a limit to the publics patience with the counting. Instead of pressing to count all the states votes, they decided it was necessary to pursue a narrow and legally conservative strategy, focused on a relatively small handful of disputed ballots in counties that happened to use an antiquated punch-card voting technology. There were also legal reasons for the strategy, having to do with Floridas decentralized election system. But cynics pointed out that Gores counties just happened to be heavily Democratic ones in South Florida. While Gores mantra was count every vote, it looked like he was cherry-picking. Republican protesters waved signs reading Sore-Loserman.

Meanwhile, bolstered by their presumption of victory, the Bush team showed little compunction about using every legal tool and argument at its disposal, even if it contradicted itself. The Republicans argued that the election was over once the votes were counted on Election Day except when it came to a thousand or so contested overseas ballots from members of the military that filtered in long afterward, which the Gore campaign suspected had been sent after the election. (There were unsubstantiated rumors that a notorious South Carolina political operative was running an overseas harvesting operation for Bush.) The Bush team argued that the ballots should be processed by machines, not subjective human beings except in the case of a disputed cache of absentee ballots from Republican strongholds, which had been fiddled with by party workers who corrected innocent mistakes that made them invalid. (A young Amy Coney Barrett worked on the Republican side of that lawsuit.)

Gore would have won the election easily if either set of Republican absentee votes was thrown out. But trying to invalidate some votes, while counting others, would have looked inconsistent. Gores lawyers, including David Boies, wanted to bring suits anyway, figuring they were trying to win in litigation, and they had good legal arguments.But Lieberman went on TV and surprised everyone by saying Florida should err on the side of counting military votes.

Fuck Joe Lieberman, one of Gores staffers in Tallahassee shouted.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Gores concern about intellectual consistency, appearances, and public impatience was misplaced. There was never a moment when rank-and-file Democrats turned against him. They really just wanted to win. That is the most enduring lesson that a generation of politicians took from the 2000 election, one that has found its most virulent exemplar in Donald Trump. Thursday morning, presumably referring to Georgia and Pennsylvania, Trump tweeted, STOP THE COUNT! Meanwhile, he is pinning his hope for a comeback on a late-breaking surge in the ongoing counts in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Yesterday he sued to stop the vote count in Michigan, where Biden is projected to win. He has announced plans to pursue a recount in Wisconsin.

On the morning after the 2000 election, a jet full of Gore campaign workers and lawyers flew to Florida with little preparation or knowledge of recount law. Most of them had packed clothes for a quick trip they ended up staying for 36 days. No one involved in the 2020 election disputes has any illusions that they will be over soon. As my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti reported in October, Klain and the Biden team have been getting ready for a post-election legal battle for months. They can take heart from one further lesson of Florida: Even making up a few hundred votes proved to be difficult ultimately impossible for Gore. When a consortium of media organizations later did its own unofficial recount of the undervote ballots in question in the Supreme Court case, they found that depending on the standard for determining a vote employed, the state recount would have most likely produced little or no gain for Gore. In the best Gore scenario ironically, under the strictest standard he won by a margin of just three votes.

By contrast, at the moment, Trump faces deficits of tens of thousands of votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, and (as of this writing) more than 7,000 in Nevada. If the margins hold, a recount probably wont help. What Trump will likely be looking for, then, is invalidation throwing out tons of votes on the kind of technicalities that the Gore campaign declined to pursue.

Whether a Supreme Court that now includes three Trump appointees will rule for him, as he has predicted, is anyones guess. But if you are curious what basis they might use to override a states popular vote, its worth looking to the argument in the little-rememberedfirstcase before the Supreme Court in 2000, Bush v. Palm Beach Canvassing Board. That ended with an inconclusive decision, but during oral argument,Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist dusted off an 1892 case, McPherson v. Blacker, which found that there is no color for the contention that the Constitution establishes an individual right to vote for presidential electors. Instead, they suggested, the ultimate power lies with state legislatures, not citizens. Republicans in Florida had actually prepared a bill to appoint a slate of electors, and Governor Jeb Bush had said he would sign it, making his brother president. (You could imagine a similar scenario playing out today in a Republican controlled state like Georgia or Arizona). But that never came to pass in Florida, because Bush v. Gore made the issue moot.

On Tuesday, December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bush v. Gore. Gores advisers had prepared him for the outcome. Forget it, said his campaign chairman Bill Daley, channeling the hardball political culture of his familys Chicago. Five Republicans. Were going right in the tank. But Gore, being Gore, had allowed himself a little hope in the nonpartisan authority of the institution. He had sat down to write an op-ed column for the New York Times, in anticipation of a ruling that would allow the recount to continue. He concluded with a quotation from Lincolns first inaugural address, delivered on the eve of the Civil War:

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?

Gores column was never published, because a ruling came down the evening after the argument, and just as Daley had predicted, it was 5-4. The majority had ruled against Gore based on, of all things, the 14th Amendments Equal Protection Clause, saying that the lack of a uniform standard to decide what constituted a valid ballot meant that the recount privileged some voters over others. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a searing dissent, pointing out that if anyone had an equal protection complaint, it was the thousands of Black voters who had seen their ballots disproportionately invalidated. But the Gore team had downplayed those complaints in its lawsuits and public messaging talking about voter suppression was equated, in the political culture of the time, with playing the race card and Ginsburgs friendly adversary Scalia requested that she tone down the Al Sharpton tactics.

Ginsburg grudgingly deleted the reference to race.

Bush v. Gore was a muddled opinion, which took some time for Gores team to work out on a conference call, but finally they concluded they were out of options. It may have been wrong to shoot us, Boies said, but were still dead. One man wanted to keep going, though: Klain. He refused to give up, and spent the night of the decision drawing up legal papers in the hopes that the Florida Supreme Court might establish a uniform standard, thus satisfying the 14th Amendment problem.

Early the next morning, Gore and his lawyers convened for another conference call.

Then proceeded the most fascinating kind of historic thing that I have ever been witness to, Tom Goldstein, an appellate attorney who participated in the Bush v. Gore argument, told me a few years ago. It was the debate and discussion about whether to adhere to the Courts decision, which was really, really, really interesting. There was a debate back and forth between the people on the call about whether to fight notwithstanding the Supreme Court, and insist that the Court had effectively tinkered with democracy. It was a real conversation. And it was a real conversation that lasted 20 minutes.

Finally, the vice-president shut his lawyers down. It was Gore eventually who just said, No, this is America. Were done. Were not going to fight anymore.

That evening, Al Gore conceded the election, preserving the legitimacy of the American system of democracy, at least for another 20 years.

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The 2000 Election Never Ended - New York Magazine

Amid a pandemic, a presidential election and the nationwide protests advocating for black lives, the Rev. Al Sharpton is asking for every American to rise up.

This is not about whether or not Joe Biden turns you on or Donald Trumps turns you off, this is about the direction the country is going in. Its not just about an election; its about a direction, said the civil rights activist on Mondays edition of Closer Look, speaking about his new book, Rise Up: Confronting a Country at the Crossroads.

Sharpton, who leads the National Action Network, talked with show host Rose Scott about the book that encourages readers to make the U.S. a more equal, fair and just society by taking action in their communities.

Everybody should read Rise Up, particularly those of us that dont feel theres any hope, he said.

During Sharptons candid conversation with Scott, he spoke about several topics that are discussed in the book, including his friendship with Shirley Chisholm, discovering his lifes calling, fighting for civil and human rights issues through an intersectional movement, police violence, and giving the eulogy at George Fyolds funeral.

Guest:

Rev. Al Sharpton, civil rights activist, talk show host and founder of the National Action Network

To listen to the full conversation, please click the audio player above.

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Rev. Al Sharpton Discusses New Book, 'Rise Up: Confronting A Country At The Crossroads' | 90.1 FM WABE - WABE 90.1 FM

Twitch is giving its platform to race and equality by hosting a wide range of important public figures, including Rev. Al Sharpton and Arnold Schwarze

Even though it feels like a lifetime ago in the lead up to the November election, protests against police brutality and for racial equality have never stopped since the beginning of 2020. They merely intensified and sharpened in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's murders at the hands of police. On top of that, the Covid-19 pandemic is putting into sharp relief the racial divide in America and abroad.

This issue has gotten so big that even Twitch is weighing in. After the controversy that hit Twitch earlier this summer for posting a Black Lives Matter video where the hosts lacked the very diversity they were trying to promote, Twitch is now hosting a diverse group of celebrities, business executives, academics, and politicians, including former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Reverend Al Sharpton, as they discuss what can be done about racism in America.

All weekend long, the ATTN: Twitch account will broadcast Unfinished Business: Race and Equity in America. This "live summit takeover" will run from now until Sunday, October 18th, with programming beginning from noon to 4:00 PM PST (3:00 to 7:00 PM EST).

Subjects for these panels and interviews will be wide-ranging and include "race, policing, education, environmental justice, voting rights, healthcare, and the economy, with a specific aimtoward young people--hence, the summit being broadcast on Twitch.

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I dont believe in summits where we all talk just to hear ourselves talk - I want our summit to focus on concrete policies that we can enact now, to create a new era of civil rights. As someone who owes this country everything, I cant stand that a Black kid born in Minneapolis doesnt have the same opportunity as a white bodybuilder born in Thal, Austria, said Governor Schwarzenegger in a prepared statement. It is time for change to finish the job our founding fathers started.

You can take a look at the full schedule of panels and discussion over on the ATTN: channel here. Governor Schwarzenegger headlines both the Friday and Sunday interviews, but youll also get some other big names like Soledad OBrien, Usher, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson, and Congressman Will Hurd.

Unfinished Business: Race and Equity in America is on Twitch from now until Sunday at 4 PM PST.

Source: Twitch

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On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Reverend Al Sharpton legendary civil rights icon, former presidential candidate and author of Rise Up: Confronting a Country at the Crossroads. He discusses the 2020 presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden; the BlackLivesMatter movement that has swept the world since the death of George Floyd; the battle within the Democratic Party between the progressives and the right wing; why he believes Biden is the best choice for America despite a record marred by the crime bill, Obama-era foreign policy, and neoliberal economics; his former friendship with Trump; apathy among African Americans that things can really change; the Republican Partys pimping of the Democratic Partys deficiencies, and more.

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