Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President Book

Bugliosi turns a prosecutor's eye to Bush v. Gore and finds the decision not just lacking substance, but a criminal act.

First he deals with motive. All of the 5 justices who chose Bush as president came up through partisan Republican politics. While that's expected (since they come to their positions through the political process), integrity in upholding their oath to support the Constitution has been expected to take precedence. Beyond their partisan pasts and connections, 3 of the 5 had immediate and direct interest in a Bush presidency. Justice O'Connor publically said that if Gore won she'd have to postpone her retirement at least 4 years (so as not to have a Democratic President appoint her successor.) Justice Thomas's wife, through her Heritage Foundation position was poised to serve on the Bush transition team and Justice Scalia's two sons work for a law firm that handles Bush's legal business.

Bugliosi doesn't say what would happen if we, the non-elite, helped out friends or worked things to our interest through service on a jury, but I'm sure something would.

Next Bugliosi deals with the legal issues. How could the court accept Bush's argument that Bush needed "equal protection" from Gore? That is... the court assumed that Bush won the election and that by counting the votes Gore could take it away from him. Votes, 60,000 in this case, the sacred element of our democracy... the very core of what people fight and die for... were negated as the Court ignored its own entrenched states right biases and regarded time frames as inflexible when complete past practice and case law showed recounts and seating delegates, (with disputes always decided by states and state courts), to be viewed as target dates and not rigid deadlines.

On p. 155 Bugliosi has a hypothetical script. He suggests the dialog of the justices and how they came to "reason out" their unsigned opinion that allowed them to pick the president over 50 million voting Americans.

In the early part of the book (written in 2001) he likens this decision to the "preposterous" idea that Republican prosecutors would prosecute only Democrats and vice versa. It was strange that he would mention it, because it was this exact thing that piqued my current interest in this 2001 book.