Politics & Power Quote by Vincent Bugliosi

Bugliosi’s line is a prosecutorial punch disguised as a lament: the sentence walks you right up to a chilling proposition, lets you feel its seduction, then detonates it with a plainspoken verdict. “If it’s a close election” mimics the calm, managerial language Americans use to sanitize democratic stress. Close becomes code for: the public can’t be trusted to finish the job, so an institution built to interpret law should be allowed to complete the political transaction.

The subtext is an indictment of elite convenience. “Better for the Supreme Court to pick the president” is not offered as a genuine solution; it’s a parody of how quickly procedural anxiety morphs into permission for anti-democratic outcomes. Bugliosi’s devastating clause - “whether or not he won the election” - strips away every polite euphemism and exposes the core logic: legitimacy is optional when power is at stake.

Context matters here: Bugliosi is speaking in the long shadow of Bush v. Gore, when the Court effectively ended Florida’s recount and, in practice, decided the presidency. His outrage isn’t abstract constitutional theory; it’s a reaction to a cultural moment when many commentators treated judicial intervention as a stabilizing force rather than a democratic rupture. The closing phrase, “insane on its face,” does rhetorical work precisely because it refuses sophistication. It denies the Court the comforting aura of complexity and returns the argument to a moral baseline: a president chosen by judges over voters isn’t “controversial.” It’s madness wearing a robe.