Reddit reviews The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

They absolutely should have rejected it. It is very clear that the majority (Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas) were acting more on behalf of their Republican partisanship than coherent judicial philosophy.

Now, Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist were always going to be for Bush. The real question were the four moderates, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, and Breyer. All of these moderates, except Breyer, were Republican, and had been appointed by a Republican President. By this time, Kennedy and O'Connor tended to be more conservative than not, Souter and Breyer more liberal than not. O'Connor was the swing vote on nearly all 5-4 cases, but she was in the end a conservative who tried to tailor the court's opinions to be narrow rulings in line with public opinion.

One of the lawyers who worked in Anthony Kennedy's was so sure that certiorari would be denied he didn't even bring a legal pad when Kennedy summoned him to talk about the case.

>The legal basis for Bush’s position was incidental and rather weak. The principal argument concerned the obscure provision of Article II in the Constitution that provides that each state shall choose electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.” The Republicans said that it was now the Florida [Supreme Court]—and not the legislature—that was “directing” how Florida chose the winner of the state’s electoral votes. The sole authority for this claim was a nearly incomprehensible opinion of the Court from 1892. (The Florida court had disposed of this article II argument by saying that it was simply doing what courts always do—interpreting Florida election law, not making it. Almost as a throwaway, the Bush team added another claim—that the recounts violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Their casual attention to this argument—just three pages in a forty-two page brief—was understandable. The Supreme Court, in granting cert in the Palm Beach case, had thought the equal protection argument was so weak that it refused even to hear argument on the issue.

Originally, Rehnquist was going to rule in favor of Bush on the Article II grounds, but Kennedy preferred the Equal Protection Clause. Since Rehnquist needed Kennedy for a majority, he got his way.

>The problem with Kennedy’s analysis, as innumerable commentators subsequently pointed out, was that no court, much less the Supreme Court, had ever before imposed any kind of constitutional rule of uniformity in the counting of ballots. Most states, including Florida, used different voting technologies in a single election. Kennedy was right that the recount might have produced inconsistencies and anomalies. But he was wrong on the larger, far more important point. A recount would have been more accurate than the certified total. The court’s opinion preserved and endorsed a less fair, and less accurate, count of the votes.

O'Connor thought that Kennedy's logic was flawed, but she didn't want a broad ruling that mandated new, uniform election laws.
>Kennedy responded by adding what become the most notorious sentence in the opinion—indeed, a single sentence that summed up so much of what was wrong with what the Court did. “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances,” Kennedy wrote, “for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”
>In other words, the opinion did not reflect any general legal principles; rather the Court was acting only to assist a single individual—George W. Bush.

So the conservative majority essentially said that continuing the recount amounted to irreparable harm to Bush behalf of the Equal Protection clause, since the recount practices were not standardized, and issued a stay, stopping the recount. This need not have happened:
>Breyer had a simple solution: remand the case back to the Florida Supreme Court, order those justices to set a clear standard for the whole state, and the recount the votes. Breyer loved compromise—and he thought this was a good one.

Stevens was very much on the ball with his dissent that pointed out that recounting votes in no way amounted to irreparable harm. Souter was heartbroken by the case, and considered resigning over the crudely partisan way in which the Court took up and decided the case. O'Connor permanently stained her reputation of trying to tailor to public opinion (Gore had won more votes from Americans than any other candidate up to this point, excepting Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide). But O'Connor's Republican partisanship overrode that in Bush v. Gore (many forget that she was the Republican Senate Majority Leader in Arizona back in the day). O'Connor (and even Kennedy) ended up moving to the left after Bush v. Gore (they were very much in disagreement with how the Bush Administration legally conducted the War on Terror).

Today, the Justices on the case try very much not to talk much about the decision (even Scalia, the most gleefully partisan Republican on the Court), and O'Connor recently publicly stated that
>“Maybe the Court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ ”

The quotes come from Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

Absolutely. Here are a few of my faves and I'm tagging /u/laMuerte5 as he/she was interested in the podcast part.

Books (none of these are affiliate links and i'm going to try and get the formatting right):
The Nine This covers Reagan era through GW era Justices.
The Brethren covers Nixon and Ford Justices
The Supreme Court I haven't read this one but it is on my list. Although it is a textbook, I have heard that it is an easy read.
The Everything American Government Book I actually bought this for a secret santa exchange and after flipping through it, I ended up buying a Kindle copy for myself. This is great for a general overview and is way better than the For Dummies books on politics.

Podcasts:
First Mondays covers the Supreme Court well. There is another podcast called Supreme Podcast but they haven't updated since March.
John Dickerson has a really cool podcast on political campaigns called Slates Whistlestop
My History Can Beat Up Your Politics combines current events to history. It's really worth checking out.
Introduction to American Politics. I haven't checked this one out but it seems like a good one for an overview.