ASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court, in a historic and electric session, sharply challenged lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore yesterday to explain why it should go where it has not gone before and help decide the presidential election.
Outside was a crowd so large and noisy that police closed off First Street in front of the court and moved demonstrators onto the Capitol grounds. In front of scores of cameras, Bush supporters cried, ''Give it up, it's over!'' Gore backers waved signs that said, ''We've been bushwacked.''
Inside, the nine justices did not disappoint the dignitaries, nor the tourists who had waited in line all night. The justices volleyed for 90 minutes in a verbal tennis match featuring two of the nation's top lawyers, Theodore Olson for Bush and Laurence Tribe for Gore, as well as Joseph Klock, representing Florida's secretary of state, Katherine Harris.
Then, without a word about when or how they would rule, the justices left the bench to start deciding whether the Florida Supreme Court violated a federal law, or was properly interpreting state law, when it extended the certification deadline to allow for manual recounts of votes for president in some Florida counties.
The court has a wide range of options at its disposal. A ruling for either side, Gore's supporters said, would allow the vice president to keep contesting the election in the state courts in Florida. Bush's advocates were hoping for a broad ruling that would hand the election to the Texas governor by nullifying all recounts.
From its questioning, the court seemed deeply divided over justiciability - that is, whether this was really an issue for a federal court to decide. Justices wondered aloud whether there was a role for them when the state judiciary has sovereignty over state laws and Congress ultimately will rule on which presidential electors to accept. The justices also asked whether their opinion would make any difference, since Bush already has been certified the winner in Florida.
The two justices appointed by President Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, seemed the most inclined to let the Florida high court ruling stand. Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter, appointed by Presidents Ford and Bush, respectively, seemed similarly disposed, at least as far as one can judge from the tenor of their questioning.
The court's other GOP appointees - Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy - were more inclined to take issue with the Florida court's ruling. Justice Clarence Thomas, who usually is part of the court's conservative majority, did not speak during the hearing.
Partisanship, if not on the bench, was evident throughout the room. In the first row of seats, behind the Supreme Court lawyers, were Republican Senators Orrin Hatch of Utah, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and former senator Howard Baker. They were seated with Democratic Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and Carl Levin of Michigan, and Warren Christopher and William Daley, two of Gore's senior advisers on the Florida imbroglio.
Gore's four children were seated one row back.
At exactly 10 a.m. and with no special ceremony, Rehnquist announced that the court would hear arguments on case No. 00-836, George W. Bush v. the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board.
Olson, up first, said the Florida Supreme Court ''overturned and materially rewrote'' part of a state law that was not only ''carefully formulated to govern the conduct'' of the presidential election, but also was protected by the US Constitution and federal law, which gives state legislatures authority over elections.
The Supreme Court's actions, Olson said, resulted in the ''controversy, conflict, and chaos that, we submit, exists in Florida today.''
Ginsburg, who is generally not one of the court's reliable votes in favor of states' rights, told Olson she could not remember a case where ''we have impugned a state Supreme Court the way you are doing in this case.
''I mean, in case after case, we have said we owe the highest respect to what the state Supreme Court says is the state law,'' Justice Ginsburg said.
Stevens, at 80 the court's oldest member, suggested that Florida's Supreme Court was acting within its authority to try to reconcile two state laws - in this case, one that imposed a deadline, another that allowed for recounts in counties so populous that they could not be completed by the deadline.
''If it were purely a matter of state law, I suppose normally we would leave it alone, where the state Supreme Court found it,'' O'Connor said. ''So you probably have to persuade us there is some federal law issue here. Otherwise, why are we acting?''
Olson, a partner in the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said the federal law in question - Title 5, Chapter 1, Section 3 of the US Code - was passed by Congress in 1887 to avoid a repeat of 1876, when each state sent two sets of electoral votes to Congress, one for GOP candidate Rutherford Hayes and a second for Democrat Samuel Tilden.
Noting that, O'Connor, Souter and Rehnquist suggested that Congress, not the judiciary, might be the proper federal branch to settle the current dispute.
''Why should the federal judiciary be interfering in what seems to be a very carefully thought-out scheme for determining what happens?'' Souter asked.
One reason, offered by O'Connor and Kennedy in the course of questioning, was that Florida's high court had not just interpreted state law, it had changed it by moving the deadline to an arbitrary new date.
''Certainly the date changed,'' O'Connor said. ''That is a dramatic change, and it was done by the court.''
Kennedy added, ''What we're talking about is having laws of sufficent specificity and stability that people can rely on in advance, and not having them changed after the fact.''
Tribe said that while the popular culture may say it is unfair to change the rules of the game, ''I think that misses the point when the game is over, and when it's over in a kind of photo finish, that leaves people unsure who won.''
Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor, said a manual recount ''would rather be like looking more closely at the film of a photo finish. It's nothing extraordinary, not like suddenly moving Heartbreak Hill or adding a mile or subtracting a mile from a marathon.''
Scalia said that by using the voting-rights provisions in the state constitution to justify extending the recount deadline, the Florida Supreme Court not only usurped the Legislature's prerogative in making election law, but also erred by putting the Florida Constitution above US law.
''Maybe your experience with the legislative branch is different from mine, but in my experience they are resigned to the intervention of the courts, but they have never invited it,'' Scalia said.
Breyer suggested that any Supreme Court ruling might be moot, since Harris certified Bush the winner Nov. 26.
Klock, Harris's lawyer, told the justices that if the Florida Supreme Court ruling were overturned, Bush's victory margin would grow from 537 votes to slightly more than 900. That would ''end the litigation that currently exists'' because Gore would not be allowed to pursue more recounts, he said.
Michael Zeldin, a lawyer and spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, disagreed. ''Regardless of how the Supreme Court decides, the contest procedures are ongoing,'' he said.
In Austin, a source close to Bush said it was hard to tell how the justices would rule.
''I think if you forced the lawyers to answer, their guess would be that the Supreme Court will punt, either by saying that it's wrong to inject the court into a political process, or that the certification issues that pertained when Bush filed the case are no longer relevant,'' the source said.
Susan Low Bloch, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said it would be in the high court's best interest, if it did not reach a clear consensus, to dismiss the case rather than decide it by a 5-4 vote.
''It would be a shame for this institution, that people still look to with respect, to be perceived as just another partisan, political body,'' Bloch said.
Glen Johnson of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
