At the time I am submitting this manuscript for publication (March 9, 2001), news organizations have not yet completed their count of all the Florida undervotes to determine who really won Florida's twenty-five electoral votes, and hence, the office of the Presidency of the United States. But lest anyone believe that their findings, whatever they turn out to be, are relevant in any way at all to what you are about to read, let me assure you that they are not. As I say in my Nation article of February 5, and it bears repeating: "It misses the point to argue that the five Justices stole the election only if it turns out that Gore overcame Bush's lead in the undervote recount. We're talking about the moral and ethical culpability of these Justices, and when you do that, the bell was rung at the moment they engaged in their conduct. What happened thereafter cannot unring the bell and is therefore irrelevant."

One thing is for sure. Irrespective of the result reached by the newspapers, we know that more Floridians intended to vote for Al Gore than George Bush on November 7, 2000. The confusing butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county resulted in literally thousands of people erroneously voting either for Pat Buchanan, or Al Gore and Pat Buchanan (the latter situation, called an "overvote," rendered their ballot invalid). Absent this confusion, Gore would easily have won Florida and there wouldn't have been any Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore for us to be talking about.

But apart from that, no one, not even the rabid right-wing of the Republican Party, would quarrel with the proposition that if, for example, a person premeditated the murder of a fellow human being by blowing him up in his car, but for whatever reason the explosive did not detonate, that person is unquestionably just as evil and blackhearted as he would be if his mission had not failed.

Not even God can change the past, so regardless of the findings of the newspapers, the conduct of the five conservative justices of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore remains the same. That conduct was either criminal or it was not. And if it was, a subsequent finding that Bush won the Florida vote cannot diminish, even one iota, the criminality of their act.

If Bush ends up winning, the automatic response by the mental midgets on the far right will be that the five justices acted completely properly, but even if they didn't, "It doesn't matter. Bush won the election anyway." But it is they, not those of us who are interested in justice and fair play, whose folly should be treated so dismissively.

To elaborate further on the possible results of the counting of votes in Florida by the major newspapers, if Gore ends up overcoming Bush, then Bush instantly becomes the most famous imposter in the history of democracy, one who is running this country only because of the high crime committed by the Supreme Court, and for no other reason -- certainly a first in U.S. history and, I daresay, perhaps the first time that such an event has ever occurred in any duly constituted democracy.

But even if Bush ends up winning, not only does the enormity of the Court's crime, as indicated, remain identical, but further, the fact remains that on December 12, in direct defiance of the Constitution they swore to uphold, and without any authority at all, the Supreme Court chose Bush to be the next President of the United States. At the point in time of Bush's inauguration on January 20, his ascension to the presidency resulted not from a finding that he had won Florida after a count of all the undervotes, but simply because of the Supreme Court's decision on December 12. After all, no one has suggested that the five Justices who chose Bush to be President were clairvoyant. They had no more way of knowing how a counting of all the Florida undervotes would turn out than Madonna would.

WITH THE WIDESPREAD circulation of The Nation article, the catalyst for this new volume, came an unwelcome confirmation of something I had already concluded about the vast majority (not all) of human beings. They simply do not have sufficient character to rise above their own self-interest. Inasmuch as the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Bush v. Gore, which handed the election to Bush, is irreversible, and nothing that any of us do can change this reality, I would ask you, the reader, to indulge me the idle rumination that follows.

I consider myself a moderate, one who has both liberal and conservative friends and acquaintances. If one accepts the harsh conclusions in the article you are about to read, I believe that amidst the welter of emotions it should induce is an overriding one -- that of considerable anger against the five conservative Supreme Court Justices who stole the last presidential election. And indeed, almost without exception, this has been the precise response I have gotten from my liberal friends and most of my moderate ones. They want to hang these Justices in the town square at noontime.

But with my conservative friends, though unable to circumvent the evidence or pierce the logic set forth in the article (obviously, for the very few who thought they could, and disagreed with my conclusions, what follows in this discussion would not be applicable), and though many have even been very complimentary about it, using adjectives like "powerful," "thought-provoking," a few have even said "great," I am still waiting (will I have to wait, as they say, "until the cows come home"?) for my first conservative friend or even acquaintance to show the slightest bit of anger over what these justices did. If the reader can't decipher the implications of what I have just said, I'll spell it out for you. Their guy, Bush, got in, and they don't give a damn how he got there. In other words, they aren't troubled in the least that the Supreme Court may have committed one of the biggest crimes in American history. Their hatred for the Democratic Party (even though it had just delivered; or at least contributed to the deliverance of eight years of unprecedented prosperity and peace, and their candidate, Bush, had no national or international experience, had no intellectual curiosity and seemed to be proud of it, and looked as presidential as the guy who walks on stage when the magician asks for volunteers) was such that as long as they got those dreaded Democrats out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it was immaterial how they did it or who their candidate was. One is reminded of Jack Ruby's remark after killing Lee Harvey Oswald: "Someone had to kill that son of a bitch."

It wouldn't be so alarming to me if this posture were only being taken by the far right -- you know, the thin-lipped, chinless people with beady eyes of no particular color who wear their patriotism on their sleeves, with very little left inside. But these are regular, normal, conservative Republicans. Why this deep-seated, almost atavistic hatred for Democrats I really don't know. And this blind rancor has been going on for decades. One of Franklin D. Roosevelt's favorite stories he used to tell during his presidency was about a wealthy businessman commuter from heavily Republican Westchester County in New York who would hand the newsboy at the train station a dime every morning for the New York Times, glance at the front page, then hand the paper back as he rushed out the door to catch his train. Finally one day, the newsboy, unable to control his curiosity any longer, asked the man why he always only looked at the front page. "I'm interested in an obituary notice," the man said. "But the obituaries are on the back pages of the paper, and you never look at them," the newsboy retorted. "Son," the man said, "the son of a bitch I'm interested in will be on page one."

What is disturbing to me about these conservative friends and acquaintances of mine who aren't troubled in the least by the fact that five Supreme Court Justices stole the election from Al Gore and his party is what it says about who, deep down, they really are, and what their values and sense of right and wrong truly are. If one is wondering if, in the event the shoe were on the other foot, Democrats would be responding the same way, my answer is that I believe they would, though not to such a great degree. My assessment (at least as to those on the margins of both parties) is that although there is fanaticism among both groups, it is greater on the far right than the far left, and the far right unquestionably is much more mean-spirited. And, of course, we know from poll after poll that Republicans are more unlikely to cross over to the Democratic side for any candidate or issue than Democrats are to the Republican side.

With respect to this matter of conservative Republicans being more than willing to overlook whatever the Supreme Court or anyone else did to get their man in the oval office, can you imagine if this insanity prevailed in other areas of our society? You know, a Republican prosecutor not wanting to prosecute Republican defendants, and Democratic prosecutors giving a free ride to Democratic defendants? Of course, the notion is preposterous on its face, but how, I ask you, does it differ in its essence from the fact that no Republican I have yet met (undoubtedly, there are some out there) has the slightest bit of anger over what the Supreme Court did?

Looking at the same issue but from a different perspective, a liberal female acquaintance of mine who erroneously made the assumption that I was a conservative because of my law enforcement background, called to congratulate me upon reading The Nation article, then added, "I didn't know you were a liberal." The translation for this remark and the position my Republican friends and acquaintances take? If a Republican does something wrong, no Republican is supposed to criticize him (remember Ronald Reagan's infantile eleventh commandment -- thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican), only liberal Democrats. How ludicrous can people get? I mean, objectivity is still a virtue in this country, is it not? And if it is, then in determining the culpability, or lack thereof, of the five Justices' conduct, what in the world does their political affiliation, or ours, have to do with it? I feel silly for even having to pose the question.

If any reader wants to know, let me say that if a five-member majority of the Supreme Court had done for Gore what it did for Bush, I can give you a one hundred percent guarantee I'd be writing the same, identical article you are about to read. If I may say so myself, my credibility on matters such as this is unassailable. For instance, I was strongly opposed to the destruction of the Nixon presidency over Watergate. Though I didn't condone President Nixon's conduct, I took the prevalent European view at the time of the scandal that a mature nation realistically balances the harm to the nation from the collapse of a presidency against the extent of malfeasance of the administration in power. And with Watergate, I became so upset and angry with people treating the matter as though it was so much more serious than it really was (prosecutor Leon Jaworski, incredibly, analogized it to the Third Reich, which resulted, as we know, in fifty million deaths during World War II, including the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust), and with politicians (who, if the truth be told, virtually all try to cover up their own misconduct -- and here, Nixon didn't even have any foreknowledge of the break-in) reacting with phony horror over the president's transgressions (e.g., Senator Ted Kennedy, who did everything within his power to suppress the facts of Chappaquiddick) that I actually wrote a twenty-page treatment for a book that I tentatively titled Watergate, America's Finest Hour of Hypocrisy, but prior commitments prevented me from following through on the book. Little could I have known that a quarter of a century later, the nation's and the media's certifiable insanity in making a Himalayan mountain out of President Clinton's silly little girlfriend scandal, which was much less serious than Watergate, would make the response to Watergate look like a perfectly normal one.

There are two points the reader should keep in mind while reading The Nation article. Although the Florida election dispute spawned a considerable number of lawsuits in the lower courts, apart from a few tangential references to them, The Nation article deals only with the Supreme Court decision of Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000. Although Bush partisans have inevitably wanted to discuss alleged improprieties by the Florida Supreme Court, even if we assume the allegations to be true, they have nothing to do with the Supreme Court decision that handed the election to Bush -- which was based solely on a purported violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment -- and therefore, are essentially irrelevant. If anyone doubts what I am saying, let me quote the applicable paragraph near the beginning of the opinion of the court in Bush v Gore:

"The petition [of George W. Bush] presents the following questions: whether the Florida Supreme Court established new standards for resolving Presidential election contests, thereby violating Art. II, Sec. 1, cl.2, of the United States Constitution and failing to comply with 3 U.S.C. Sec. 5, and whether the use of standardless manual recounts violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. With respect to the equal protection question, we find a violation of the Equal Protection Clause." Hence, though not conclusive, if there is any inference to be drawn at all, it would have to be that the Court, in its per curiam, majority ruling, did not find that the Florida Supreme Court violated Art. II, Sec.1, cl.2 or Title 3 of the U.S. Code, Sec.5. Nothing is more common than for an appellate court, including the United States Supreme Court, to give several bases for its ruling. In fact, the majority of decisions by appellate courts contain multiple reasons for the court's decision (e.g., "in addition," "moreover," "there is a second, independent basis for _____") to bolster its validity and insulate it from subsequent attack or reversal. In Bush v. Gore, the Court clearly knew that its Equal Protection Clause argument was a legal gimmick. But as bad as it was, the Court must have felt it was markedly superior to the Bush argument that the Florida Supreme Court had violated Article II and Title 3, that the latter argument was too much of an embarrassment, even for them, to reduce to parchment. If not, what other possible reason could there be for the Court, knowing it was making perhaps the most important ruling in its history, not to try to fortify and buttress its ruling with these other arguments in its per curiam majority ruling?

Secondly, if any reader is seriously interested in learning what happened in the Supreme Court decision of Bush v. Gore, they have to disabuse themselves of any preconceived notion that because the Justices are wearing robes and are on the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, they are simply incapable of conducting themselves in a manner that smacks of criminality. Because if one takes that position, a position that has no foundation in logic, he or she obviously will not be receptive to the evidence or to the common sense inferences from that evidence.

A word about judges. The American people have an understandably negative view of politicians, public opinion polls show, and an equally negative view of lawyers. Conventional logic would seem to dictate that since a judge is normally both a politician and a lawyer, people would have an opinion of them lower than a grasshopper's belly. But on the contrary, the mere investiture of a twenty-five-dollar black cotton robe elevates the denigrated lawyer-politician to a position of considerable honor and respect in our society, as if the garment itself miraculously imbues the person with qualities not previously possessed. As an example, judges have, for the most part, remained off-limits to the creators of popular entertainment, being depicted on screens large and small as learned men and women of stature and solemnity as impartial as sunlight. This depiction ignores reality.

As to the political aspect of judges, the appointment of judgeships by governors (or the president in federal courts) has always been part and parcel of the political spoils or patronage system. For example, 97 percent of President Reagan's appointments to the federal bench were Republicans. Thus, in the overwhelming majority of cases there is an umbilical cord between the appointment and politics. Either the appointee has personally labored long and hard in the political vineyards, or he is a favored friend of one who has (oftentimes a generous financial supporter of the party in power). As Roy Mersky, professor at the University of Texas Law School, says: "To be appointed a judge, to a great extent is a result of one's political activity."

Incredibly, and unfortunately, the political connection holds true all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, where, for instance, the last three Chief Justices, like so many of their predecessors in history, have all been creatures of politics. Earl Warren, a former California Governor and Attorney General, was the chairman and keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention in 1944 and the vice-presidential nominee on the Republican national ticket in 1948. Warren Burger in 1948 was the floor manager for Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen's home-state candidacy at the Republican National Convention, and in 1952 he pledged the Minnesota delegation to Dwight D. Eisenhower's successful presidential bid at the convention. (With no previous judicial experience at all, in 1956 Burger was appointed by Eisenhower to the U.S. Court of Appeals.) Talk about the political vineyards, the current Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, who actively campaigned for Barry Goldwater in the latter's 1964 bid for the presidency, provided on-site legal advice in 1962 to Republicans assigned the task of challenging voters' credentials at a Phoenix polling station. The charge by four witnesses testifying under oath at Rehnquist's 1986 confirmation hearings for Chief Justice that Rehnquist had intimidated black and Hispanic voters on the ground of their inability to read was denied by Rehnquist.

What about Rehnquist's brethren on the current Supreme Court? In addition to their legal achievements, most have either been deeply involved in politics themselves, like Rehnquist, or worked for politicians or political administrations in Washington, D.C. For instance, Clarence Thomas was a legislative assistant to Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri. Danforth ended up sponsoring Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court and shepherded Thomas through the thicket of the entire nomination process. Thomas's appointment to the Court in 1991 was one of the most markedly political in recent memory. Though he was only forty-two, had never distinguished himself in any way whatsoever as a lawyer or on the bench (just one year on the U.S. Court of Appeals), and was not rated "highly qualified" by the American Bar Association, he apparently was what President George Bush was looking for at the time -- a very conservative black. Remarkably, during his Senate confirmation hearings Thomas testified that he had never once debated with anyone the merits of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion. He has since more than lived up to his meager reputation, becoming a dutiful mynah bird, without his own independent voice, of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor not only served three terms in the Arizona State Senate -- at one point being the Arizona senate majority leader -- but was a co-chairperson of the Arizona state committee to elect Richard Nixon president. Her biographer, Judith Bentley, writes in "Justice Sandra Day O'Connor" that O'Connor was very active in Republican politics in Phoenix, starting out as a county precinct worker in 1960 and in 1964 becoming the vice-chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee. Bentley writes (Page 49) that O'Connor "was rewarded for her years of party work" by being appointed a state senator. (She successfully ran for reelection twice.) Justice David Souter was the Attorney General of New Hampshire. Justice Stephen Breyer was chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Carter administration. Justice John Paul Stevens was a counsel for a House of Representatives subcommittee in the Truman administration. Justice Antonin Scalia was a lawyer in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Since the The Nation article's publication, the belief in the legal community has been that Justice Anthony Kennedy was the primary author of the Supreme Court's decision giving the election to George Bush. If for no other reason, let's take a longer look at Kennedy. A November 23, 1987, article by Aaron Freiwald in the Washington, D.C.-based legal journal Legal Times, refers to Kennedy in his pre-Court days as a "Sacramento lawyer-lobbyist" who, for no pay, traveled the state on behalf of then-Governor Ronald Reagan's anti-tax initiative. The initiative did not pass, but Kennedy, as Freiwald wrote, "won a soft spot in the heart of the governor. Not long after Kennedy's pro bono [gratuitous] work on the anti-tax initiative, Governor Reagan was in touch with the Nixon White House, urging the president to consider Kennedy, then thirty-eight, for a nomination to the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Ultimately, it was President Gerald Ford who gave Kennedy the nod in March of 1975. But several officials involved in the judicial selection process, as well as Kennedy's friends, confirm that Kennedy was viewed as Ronald Reagan's... choice for the 9th Circuit."

Kennedy's father was a legendary Sacramento lobbyist whose clientele Kennedy inherited when his father died unexpectedly in 1963. Kennedy's clients included Schenley, California Association of Dispensing Opticians, Capitol Records, GRT Corporation, and the National Association of Alcoholic Beverage Importers. Freiwald writes that "it was in the money-soaked world of politics in the capital of the nation's most popular and diverse state that Anthony Kennedy came of age, doing well by his clients, meeting the right people, and setting in motion the events that would culminate in his Supreme Court appointment."

Freiwald continued, "Kennedy contributed thousands of dollars on behalf of his clients to state and local elected officials. [He] entertained clients and legislators at exclusive restaurants and country clubs in Sacramento and San Francisco, [charging] some of his golfing fees and club memberships to his lobbying clients. Kennedy's lobbying records also show that he had a penchant for purchasing hundreds of dollars' worth of 'bottled liquor for entertainment' when wooing legislators and clients. In the 'clubby' circle of Sacramento lawyers-lobbyists, Kennedy 'was one of the guys you know,' recalls Clayton Jackson, now one of Sacramento's highest-paid lobbyists."

The long and short of it was that Anthony Kennedy was a "go to" guy, someone corporations with money went to in order to get things done. And boy, he certainly got things done (as Vice President Dick Cheney would say, "big-time") for his party, the Republican Party, in Bush v. Gore.

The aforementioned political backgrounds of some of the members of the Supreme Court, and the reminder they are all simply lawyers who wear black robes, is set forth only to reduce the Justices down to their true dimensions -- nine ordinary human beings who are subject to all the infirmities that afflict mankind. The five Justices who, I believe you will find, literally stole a presidential election from the American people, did so not because they are lawyers or politicians, but because like so many among us, including those of the highest station in life and the bluest of pedigree, they had, incubating inside of them, the most squalid of characters, a lowness that may never have manifested itself if they had never been presented with this situation. If anyone believes that a decent and honorable human being could have done something as horrendous as these Justices did, I say to you that you are very mistaken. Indeed, I told my daughter, Wendy, that what these Justices ended up doing was so monumentally base, so extraordinarily wrong and dishonorable that I wasn't gifted enough as a writer to describe it. (I view myself as a trial lawyer who happens to be a writer, not a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer.) I told her that in view of the immense, measureless consequences of their act, and the greatness of their sin, it would take a Tolstoy, a Shakespeare, a Hemingway, to give people an illuminating glimpse into the interior of the soul and marrow of these five Justices. But I suspect that a great writer would be trying to give verbal flesh to the fact that the five Justices had absolutely no regard, no respect, for fifty million Americans, whose votes for Vice President Gore they knew they were erasing as if never cast; no appreciation for, nor sense of responsibility to, the majestic and towering office they occupied; no concern at all about a betrayal of trust on their part that may be unparalleled in the recorded annals of American history.

One could say to me, "Mr. Bugliosi, if what you say is true, how could it be that five out of nine human beings on the Court could have such a low character? The law of probability defeats your position." This argument is quite similar to one made to me by a young woman a half-year ago about the essential goodness of people, which is the generally accepted view, even by most philosophers, of humankind. "Deep down," one always hears, "most people are good." But I could write a very long treatise on how people are just wonderful; that is, until their self-interest is involved. When the latter happens, watch out. I told the young lady that in no more than fifteen seconds I could demonstrate to her not only that she was wrong but that she herself already, prior to my demonstration, never truly believed what she was telling me. Try me, she challenged. I told her to imagine coming out of her home one day and seeing her car, parked out on the street, having been dented by a passing car. On the windshield is a note from the driver with his name and phone number on it, asking her to call him. Would she be surprised, I asked her. After a short pause, she smiled knowingly to me and said, "Yes." I didn't have to ask her the obvious question -- if most people, as she said, are essentially good, why would she be surprised?

My view? Although there are millions upon millions of very wonderful people in the world who do have sufficient character to rise above their own self-interest, they are in the distinct minority. And I say that not because of my intimate exposure to the darkest side of humanity in my years as a criminal prosecutor, but by being an observer, as we all are, of the human condition.