ASHINGTON - The unpalatable questions about the unresolved election have now become unavoidable.
Today the issue that the voters couldn't decide and the politicians couldn't resolve has fallen squarely on the shoulders of the branch of our system that couldn't evade it. And the future of two presidential candidates - and, it is not too much to say, the nation they both believe they have a right to lead - depends on the Florida Supreme Court.
With tensions high, emotions strong, nerves frayed, and patience short, this historic impasse is being delivered to what Alexander Hamilton, writing in the early days of the nation, called ''the least dangerous'' branch of the government. In the next few days, the justices will rule on the legitimacy of the hand-counted ballots that Vice President Al Gore desperately wants included in the Florida vote tally and that Governor George W. Bush just as desperately wants excluded.
But in a way, the true meaning of the court's intervention will be to convey legitimacy on whatever result finally emerges from the deadlocked election in Florida - a deadlock that itself holds the key to the deadlocked election nationwide.
No judge wants this issue before his court. But no judge contests the notion that courts are where the unreasonable are forced to seek reason, where the laws that support the political and legal system are adjudicated, where the difficult questions are answered, where the rights of two sides that themselves may actually be in the right are sorted out.
This is one of those moments where the nation needs a reasoning branch of government.
In nearly two weeks of maneuvering, wrangling, counting and recounting, the two men who seek to lead the executive branch have shown that they cannot bring the 2000 election to a close. They have constructed a legal and political maze without peer, twin winding paths to the presidency, each with multiple hidden escape routes, all paved with legalisms and tortured logic.
Gore wants to count every ballot, except for the ones that might hurt his cause. Bush wants a swift conclusion to the battle, but not if it ends with his rival ahead.
Months of arguing over nuances and months of crowding to the political center have convinced them that their positions, whether on issues before Election Day or on ballots after Election Day, are interchangeable. They will argue their rival's position if it will help them prevail in this battle of wills. The Republicans, ordinarily wary of federal intervention in state matters, nonetheless sought redress in federal court last week. The Democrats, who have displayed a zeal to count every ballot, nonetheless maneuvered to exclude perhaps hundreds of absentee ballots from military personnel in the expectation that they would favor Bush.
In this impasse - with angered partisans appearing on television shows and election observers shouting their protests in canvassing boards - the issue has landed in the state supreme court in Tallahassee, a forum that is accustomed to handling difficult questions, including affirmative action and capital punishment.
Six of the justices were appointed by former Democratic Governors Bob Graham and Lawton Chiles, with the seventh receiving a joint appointment by Chiles and Republican Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of the GOP presidential nominee.
But courts are unpredictable places, settings where, in Hamilton's early formulation, ''neither force nor will, but merely judgment'' prevail, forums where the ties to party are loosened and where the intellectual rigors of an argument are tightened. It was, after all, a Democratic jurist, Leon County Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis, who denied a motion Friday that would have assisted the Democratic cause by forcing hand-counted presidential votes to be counted in the state's final tally.
Now the two parties are looking to the court to find a solution that will prevent a third branch of government, the legislative, from entering the fray.
That is no idle threat. The presidential election could end up being resolved in legislatures at either the state level or the federal - or, in a nightmare scenario, in both.
The Florida Legislature has authority to step into the controversy if the results of the election aren't clear, or, in some interpretations, if the Republicans who control the Senate by 10 votes and the Assembly by 34 believe Florida's election was erroneously certified. The newly elected Congress could itself debate the certification of the Florida electors, with the House eventually selecting the president.
Hamilton called the courts ''the least dangerous branch'' because it had the least ''capacity to annoy or injure'' the other two branches. Today, more than two centuries later, it can actually save the other two from the sort of self-destructive confrontation the nation wants to avoid but which its two would-be presidents cannot bring themselves to prevent.
