Now wait just a dadburned minute. Due to the nature of the case, the fact that an injunction had already been issued, and the critical need to prevent further irreparable harm from constitutional violations of the type the Florida Supreme Court had endorsed, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its opinion just 16 hours after hearing arguments. (Indeed, in the article itself, Tribe himself referred to "the uniquely hurried and thus arguably extenuating circumstances in which the Court acted.") Meanwhile, in writing his essay responding to the arguments in favor of both major holdings in Bush v. Gore advanced in articles written by another academic, Nelson Lund, Laurence Tribe had over two and a half years to craft the arguments you found so "cogent and convincing." Also quite telling is the fact that when push came to shove, no one on Gore's legal team at the time, including good old Larry himself, pressed the argument that the controversy was nonjusticiable.
I've read Tribe's paper, as well as those that preceded and followed it, and I found his argument to be neither cogent nor convincing, even though he had the luxury, as a Harvard academic, of being an arm-chair quarterback and taking his own sweet time before second-guessing the Court and raising arguments that were not even presented to it for decision. Furthermore, Tribe acknowledged that there was considerable scholarly debate concerning the case and the "rightness" of one or more of its holdings, and that several respected judges and academicians had defended the decision on crisis-avoidance grounds.
One more thing -- as he admitted in his paper, Tribe is hardly a disinterested observer on the topic, having served as counsel to Gore during both the federal and state litigation surrounding the dispute. Don't you think that colors his analysis just a tad? After all, in the piece, Tribe dismissed Professor Lund's argument to that effect on the ground that he was nothing more than "a Bush-campaign cheerleader from the first days of the dispute."
The bottom line is that legal opinions, even those of Professor Tribe, remain like belly buttons. At the beginning (and the end) of the day, there were sufficient votes to grant certiorari, and then there were sufficient votes to reverse the Florida Supreme Court's perversion of the electoral process. As Justice Scalia noted, nothing anybody says or thinks about it now (and, in particular, the post-hoc ruminations of Tribe, Lund, and Posner et al.) can change that simple historical fact.
The only 2 ways irreparable harm could have occurred in this matter would have been a) Katherine Harris certifying a slate of Gore electors, or b) a Joint Session of Congress overruling Harris and counting the illegally appointed (by the FLA supremes) electors instead of the legally certified ones.