Point of Divergence: December 12th, 2000, Sandra Day O’Connor, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, and at the time the “median justice” (the justice closest to the political center), has an uncharacteristic bout of conscience, and sides with the four liberal justices. The 5-4 decision upholds Florida’s Supreme Court decision, enabling the statewide manual recount to continue.
There is less than a week for the recount to take place; the electors of the Electoral College are scheduled to meet in their state capitals to cast their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December (yes, that’s the actual law, it’s arbitrary), which in this case is December 18th. If the recount finishes in time, then whoever wins Florida wins the election. If it goes for Bush, he wins 271-267. If it goes for Gore, then he wins 292-246. Chances are that given the tight timeline, the results would be discounted and ignored rather than certified, with both parties claiming fraud against the other. (Gore would have won the recount, but politics is more art than science; facts don’t matter)
If Florida’s results are invalid, then Bush has 246 votes and Gore has 267. Even though Gore has more, he doesn’t have a majority of 270 (so close, and yet so far). Because neither party has technically won the General Election, a “Contingent Election” is automatically triggered by the 12th Amendment. That means it’s up to Congress to decide. On January 6th, the House and Senate will independently vote for President and Vice President respectively. On top of this, they are totally free to disregard the popular vote results; all members of congress would vote along party lines. The House votes as 50 state blocs instead of as 435 individuals, but either way, Republicans still win; at the start of the 107th Congress (2001-2003), they have a majority of votes in the House, and more importantly they have more than 26 statewide majorities, so they get more than 26 out of 50 votes (DC doesn’t get to vote in contingent elections because they have no representation in Congress; the system sucks).
George W. Bush is still elected President, despite having lost both the popular vote AND the electoral college.
Things go off the rails in the Senate, because for the first and only time in its history, it is tied dead even, 50-50. In the Senate election, they vote as individuals, not as states, so they need 51 votes to win; neither Dick Cheney nor Joe Lieberman are elected Vice President.
January 6th, 2001, Al Gore is still Vice President at this point, so he presides over the joint session, officially declares the November results to be inconclusive, and adjourns the session so the two chambers can cast their votes simultaneously. The House picks a winner in one vote, Bush becomes President-elect immediately, but the Senate remains tied 50-50, so they have to keep voting for however long it takes to come to a decision. The Contingent Election of 1801 took 36 votes over 7 days, and there were only 16 states back then, so in 2001 it’s a total slog. This could lead to three realistic scenarios, and one outrageous scenario.
Realistic Scenario 1: The Democrats capitulate and vote for Dick Cheney to become Vice President so they don’t appear as obstructionist at the start of the new session of Congress. This is what I think is the most likely scenario, which would lead to Bush and Cheney being in power in this timeline as in ours, same shit as always. Nothing substantial has changed except now everyone in the country is even more pissed off about the 2000 election than they already were (odds of a “revolution” are slim; people would just have to die mad about it)
Realistic Scenario 2: Republican Senator Jim Jeffords votes against Dick Cheney and sides with the Democrats, creating a coalition government with Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic Vice President Joe Lieberman. In our timeline, Jim Jeffords left the Republican party in May 2001, becoming an independent to caucus with the Democrats (fun fact: when he retired in 2007, his Independent seat was filled by Bernie Sanders), giving them a 51-49 majority against Bush for his first two years in office. It’s entirely possible that Jeffords would vote against party in the contingent election and give it to the Democrats (not-so-fun-fact: Lieberman himself left the Democratic party in 2006 to become an Independent and endorsed John McCain in 2008, so were he to become Bush’s VP in 2001 he would probably just become a Republican anyway)
Realistic Scenario 3: Senate Democrats and Republicans refuse to cooperate, and the 50-50 tie continues. No matter how many times they vote, it keeps resulting in a tie, so chances are they just stop voting altogether; if they can’t pick a Vice President by January 20th (inauguration day), then the office will remain vacant until President Bush can nominate someone to fill it. He might try to renominate Cheney, but this would still require 51 votes in the Senate, so there’ no guarantee it would happen. Scenario 3A has Democrats capitulating to confirm Cheney as Vice President once Bush has been sworn in, Scenario 3B has the Democrats and Jeffords voting against Cheney’s confirmation, leaving the Vice Presidency vacant until Bush picks a more moderate Republican to fill it. In that case, he would almost certainly pick Senator John McCain to be Vice President; the Democrats would be more likely to confirm moderate McCain over conservative Cheney, and Bush would be recreating Ronald Reagan’s 1980 ticket; Reagan won the Republican nomination and chose his primary opponent George H.W. Bush as his running mate so as to unite the party. In 2000, John McCain was George W. Bush’s primary opponent, so he might want to similarly unite the party.
Outrageous Scenario: okay, so the 12th Amendment states that in the event of a Contingent Election, quote, “the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice,” unquote. A quorum is the minimum number of senators who must be present for a vote to be valid, in this case 67 (so 33 could be absent, and the election could continue; if 34 were absent, the election would be put on hold until one more senator arrived), but that’s not important. What’s important here is that the amendment does not specify what happens in the event of a senate tie. Up to this point, I’ve been working under the assumption that because the amendment only mentions senators, that only senators can vote in Contingent Elections. In regular senate votes however, if there is a tie, the sitting Vice President can break it, so in theory it would be possible for Al Gore to cast the 101st vote and pick his running mate Joe Lieberman to be the Vice President under George W. Bush, 51-50, but the legality of this move is questionable at best. The Supreme Court would almost certainly step in and make a ruling on the meaning of the text of the 12th Amendment. It does NOT say that a Vice President can break a contingent election tie. It DOES say that majority of senators is needed to win; a “majority of senators” does not include the sitting Vice President, because the Vice President is not a senator. Given that conservatives have 5-4 on the Court, and that this entire scenario only happens if one of them hypothetically voted against party in the first place, they would almost certainly side against Gore here and say that his vote for Lieberman is invalid. I don’t think Gore would do this anyway, but even if he did, it would be struck down, and we’d just end up with Scenario 3 instead.
Given how Congress works, even if the Florida recount had continued, it probably still would have resulted in a Bush presidency, though Cheney may or may not be in the picture. If he is, we go down the same conservative hellhole as in our timeline, but if he’s not, then EVERYTHING would be different.
Bush was evil but stupid; Cheney was evil but SMART. He was the one pulling the strings behind the scenes, he was the one in charge of the Iraq War. It was never about terrorism, Cheney just capitalized on the timing of 9/11 to get his evil ball rolling; we went to war with Iraq in 2003 was so we could get rid of Saddam Hussein and install a US-friendly puppet to sell us Iraqi oil like the Saudis do. Iraq didn’t have nuclear weapons, Iraq didn’t have ties to al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, the war was fought for exactly three reasons. One, oil. Two, military contracts (War is a Racket). Three, Bush wanted to finish the job his daddy started (Bush Sr. pushed Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, but didn’t topple Saddam, and he lost re-election in 1992, so Bush Jr. wanted to “fix” his family legacy by killing Saddam and becoming a two-termer).
If Dick Cheney never becomes Vice President, then Bush never gets his Iraq war; we’d still get stuck in Afghanistan, we’d still have no exit strategy, but no Iraq means no Syrian Civil War, which means no ISIS. If Dick Cheney were not Vice President, ISIS would not exist! Saddam would still be in charge of Iraq, but the region would be “““stable””” (which I put in as many quotes as possible; it would be RELATIVELY stable. It would be stabler.)
Best Case Scenario, this version of Iraq would end up like Saudi Arabia. The Saudis kill people, cut off heads, burns them alive. They’re one of only 6 countries on Earth that admits they’re undemocratic; most undemocratic countries lie and say that they are, but the Saudis relish the fact that they are an absolute monarchy. We’re only allies with Saudi Arabia because they’re willing to sell us oil, while we have to fight wars with everyone else in the region to get it (Let me be clear here; all my qualms are against the Saudi Royal Family, the government, not the Arab people themselves; Arabs are no more violent than any other ethnic group on the planet, and Islam is no more violent than Christianity. I dislike the Saudi government, not the citizens. They’re just trying to live their lives in a totalitarian regime, the average Saudi Arabian citizen doesn’t like their situation any more than we do. Don’t be racist; hate the dictatorship because it’s evil, not because it’s full of brown people) If Saddam were still alive, he would just be another dictator in the region, one more drop on the bucket, e pluribus unum. The situation would be very bad, but fewer Iraqi civilians would have died (3000 people died in 9/11, we’ve killed well over 100,000 innocents. Men, women, children, civilians, non-combatants, friendlies, people, human beings)
Dick Cheney is perhaps the worst thing to happen to the world since Henry Kissinger, and both of those motherfuckers refuse to die.
