The issue people were raising that’s supposedly troublesome is that Bush didn’t just not get a majority but that Gore had more votes than Bush. Thinking that makes his presidency illegitimate ignores the Constitution, but it’s more of a cloud than merely not getting a majority.

As for filibusters, there is one consideration that goes back long before anything to do with Bush. A number of Democratic senators (probably the majority of them) believed that it would be wrong to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee. There has never been a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee except in cases of real corruption, as with Abe Fortas’ nomination for Chief Justice. They didn’t want that record to end on their watch, and it had nothing to do with the nuclear option or the political points Bush was scoring over the filibuster threat.