Politics & Power Quote by Vincent Bugliosi

Bugliosi isn’t trying to sound judicious here; he’s trying to sound prosecutorial. The repetition of “I think” reads less like uncertainty than a lawyer’s rhythm, a verbal habit that softens an accusation just enough to make it rhetorically survivable. Then he snaps the leash: “overwhelming case,” “up to no good,” “deliberately.” That’s not the language of scholarly dispute; it’s the language of motive. He isn’t arguing that the Court’s reasoning was flawed. He’s arguing mens rea.

The specific intent is clear: convert Bush v. Gore from a controversial decision into an act of intentional misconduct, the kind that belongs in a true-crime narrative rather than a constitutional law seminar. Bugliosi’s subtext is that the Supreme Court should be treated like any other powerful institution when it behaves badly: investigated, cross-examined, stripped of its mystique. “These five justices” is doing quiet work, too, reducing robed authority to a numbered cabal, a jury of suspects.

Context matters because this was written in the long shadow of 2000, when a thin procedural rationale carried massive political consequence and “legitimacy” became a national obsession. Bugliosi, famous for turning messy events into courtroom stories with villains and intent, frames the decision as a rigged outcome, not a tragic ambiguity. The line’s potency comes from its taboo: Americans are trained to critique the Court’s logic, not its integrity. Bugliosi kicks the second rail and dares the reader to follow.