The lawsuit filed by Clinton supporters seeking to close down the special “at large” caucus sites in Las Vegas casinos (and in the process to disenfranchise thousands of largely low income and minority workers) lost at least the first round in a hearing today.

It’s far from surprising that the Clinton supporters got their butts kicked. As I’ve noted before, courts have historically given wide leeway to political parties in how they conduct their affairs. (For a good discussion of the legal hurdles the plaintiffs faced, check out this excellent article in the Las Vegas Sun.)

But notwithstanding the litigation’s outcome in favor of Obama, the fact the case was even brought has now become a “fact on the ground” in the campaign: and one that may prove harmful to Clinton.

As I said a few days ago:

And by the way, in terms of the big picture, this was probably also a stupid thing to do politically. I can think of nothing that would be better calculated to turn off the Democratic base than for one of our own candidates to embrace the Bush campaign’s take no prisoners vote suppression tactics from the 2000 election and recount.

But before pushing the 2000 analogy too far, in fairness, we should probably take a closer look at whether the Nevada lawsuit can really be viewed as analogous to the Bush v. Gore case.

And, unfortunately, the answer, I think, is quite clearly yes.

Both cases involve attempts — tortured ones at that — to extend the protections of the Equal Protection Clause into the conduct of elections. To take a step back, it’s important to understand something about equal protection law: it doesn’t always work out the way one’s common sense might predict.

I remember when I was in college in Colorado, back in the mid-70s (shut up, you’ll be old someday too), one of my professors — a really bright guy — told the class about this great idea he had for a lawsuit: it upset him that when he traveled east down I-70 he could go all the way through Colorado and Kansas for free, but then, upon hitting Missouri (actually it’s the last 50 miles in Kansas), you had to start paying tolls. “I think some lawyer could have a hell of a case that this is a violation of equal protection,” he said.

To which the accurate response is, “Ah, well, actually, no. You’d be laughed out of court.”

The point I’m trying to make here, if at absurd length, is that you can’t consider the issue of equal protection based purely on what sounds unequal, because at the end of the day, everything is unequal. Equal protection law can only be understood through the prism of a long list of legal doctrines that have developed, in an often tortured and uneven way, over generations.

And the legal bottom line is that there’s generally nothing wrong at all, constitutionally speaking, with the government treating people differently, so long as there is some arguably rational reason for doing so. The major exception, of course, being so-called “suspect classifications” such as race, which may only be upheld for compelling reasons.

Turning specifically to the subject of elections, with the very important exception of the one man one vote series of decisions, courts have traditionally taken very much of a hands off attitude. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is that given the way elections have historically been conducted in the United States, unequal treatment is the rule and not the exception. And the federal courts don’t want to be placed in the position of micromanaging elections.

It is this long history of jurisprudence, of course, which makes the intellectual dishonesty of the Bush v. Gore decision so offensively obvious. As I’ve noted before, not even the Supreme Court’s number one apologist on the decision, Judge Richard Posner, could bring himself to buy into the Court’s rationale:

But in the end, even he had to throw in the towel, unable to bring himself to swallow your equal protection excuse for handing the election over to Bush; so, instead, he fell back on one of the last refuges of a scoundrel (or in this case, of a scoundrel’s defender), gamely insisting that the Court had made the right decision, just for the wrong reason.

Trying to identify the greatest fallacy of the Bush v. Gore decision is sort of like trying to identify the most annoying thing about Rush Limbaugh: there’s just so much to choose from. But my candidate for super-infamy has to be the Court’s deliberate blindness to context when it declared the recount invalid due to the application of arguably inconsistent standards in counting one vote versus the next, while, at the same time, failing to acknowledge that the very same inconsistency had existed (only worse) in the original count of the ballots.

Sadly, this exact same illogic applies to the Clinton supporters’ suit in Nevada. They complain that the rules may end up giving the votes of the caucusgoers attending the “at large” casino sites greater weight than caucusgoers at other sites.

But regardless of whether this is right or wrong factually, it ignores the context of why the party UNANIMOUSLY decided to “discriminate” in this way: IT WAS BECAUSE OTHERWISE THE CASINO WORKERS WOULD BE SUBJECTED TO DE FACTO DISCRIMINATION BY BEING DENIED THE OPPORTUNITY TO PARTICIPATE.

Not a lot of teachers work on Saturday (the teachers’ union is, of course, one of the plaintiffs, although apparently much of the membership honorably opposes this action), but lots of casino workers do. If the state party had not made this accommodation for casino workers, they would have been entirely excluded from the process. So in seeking a court order to close down the casino caucus sites what plaintiffs are really trying to do is to replace one (arguable) inequality with a much worse one.

No, the 2000 analogy is all too apropos: This thing stinks from start to finish.

(Edited to reflect the Court’s decision.)

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