Adam Cohen offers this Editorial Observer column on Chief Justice Rehnquist’s new book. Like others (see Eric Foner’s review in The Nation), Cohen sees the book more about Bush v. Gore than about the Hayes-Tilden contest of 1876.
Cohen argues in the piece for a broad reading of Bush v. Gore‘s equal protection right, one broad enough to provide a remedy for partisan gerrymandering in the pending Supreme Court Vieth case:

Buried in that flawed decision is a bold vision of democracy. The court stopped the Florida recount because the procedures did not “satisfy the minimum requirement for nonarbitrary treatment of voters.” Critics of the ruling charged that it created a “class of one,” Mr. Bush, entitled to an extraordinary level of protection. The way for the court to prove them wrong is to start taking the right to vote more seriously, and to apply the standard in future election cases.
The court is about to decide a redistricting case that will have a major impact on American democracy. Pennsylvania voters are challenging the state’s new Congressional lines, drawn to give its minority party two-thirds of the Congressional delegation. This sort of “partisan gerrymandering” is making contested Congressional races all but obsolete. If the court gives ordinary voters the same kind of vigorous protection it gave Mr. Bush, it will strike down Pennsylvania’s undemocratic lines.
The court will no doubt hear other cases of electoral unfairness that could benefit from this approach. Poor and minority voters are still more likely to vote on machines that throw away a disproportionate number of valid votes. Local officials are still too free, as Katherine Harris proved in Florida in 2000, to purge eligible voters from the rolls.

To Cohen, Bush v. Gore is an empty vessel within which courts aggressively promote a certain vision of democracy. While I share much of Cohen’s vision as a policy matter to be promoted through democratically enacted changes in election laws, it is dangerous to push courts to exercise so much power over the shape of our electoral process in the guise of constitutional adjudication.