Tag: Vincent Bugliosi

Kennedy is also one of the "Felonious Five" who installed George W. Bush in the White House. They got the nickname "Felonious Five" from Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put Charles Manson away for life. See his essay None Dare Call It Treason in The Nation, January 18, 2001. It begins: In the December 12 [2000] ruling by the US Supreme Court handing the election to George Bush, the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law. If you doubt this, try to imagine Al Gore's and George Bush's roles being reversed and ask yourself if you can conceive of Justice Antonin Scalia and his four conservative brethren issuing an emergency order on December 9 stopping the counting of ballots (at a time when Gore's lead had shrunk to 154 votes) on the grounds that if it continued, Gore could suffer "irreparable harm," and then subsequently, on December 12, bequeathing the election to Gore on equal protection grounds. If you can, then I suppose you can also imagine seeing a man jumping away from his own shadow, Frenchmen no longer drinking wine. This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 63%. (I'm a bot) Donald Trump spoke those words to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, shortly after ending his first speech to a joint session of Congress in February of 2017 according to a New York Times report that was published on Thursday evening. The connections between Kennedy and Trump, per the New York Times report are surprisingly deep, given the president's general lack of DC experience-and Trump and his allies exploited them to perfection, encouraging the swing justice to retire before the 2018 midterms, which could return control of the Senate back to Democrats. As this new report details, these ties coincided with "a quiet campaign" to ensure Kennedy's retirement and give Trump a chance to fill a spot on the Supreme Court.