NBC News: “Internal documents concerning the Supreme Court‘s historic Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 that handed the White House to President George W. Bush are being made public Tuesday, with the Library of Congress releasing a new trove of papers from the archives of Justice John Paul Stevens. Stevens, who died in 2019 at age 99, was a liberal member of the conservative-majority court who dissented in the ruling that ended a recount in Florida, handing Bush a victory over Democratic opponent Al Gore. The court was divided 7-2 in faulting the Florida Supreme Court’s implementation of a recount, but split 5-4 on finding that no further recount could take place, with the four liberal justices dissenting. Highlights identified by Library of Congress archivists include barely legible handwritten notes taken by Stevens in the private meeting in which the justices discussed the case. In one notation, Stevens seemed to report that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas said the Florida Supreme Court “did not give us an option” because of the way it decided the case. Thomas was part of the majority that overturned the state court ruling…The documents made public Tuesday relate to a 21-year period of his Supreme Court tenure, from 1984 to 2005…”