"The Betrayal of America"

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi accuses the Supreme Court's conservative majority of criminal conduct bordering on treason.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 4, 2001 | The toughest, most uncompromising words I've read anywhere lately are in the spring issue of Dissent. In an issue devoted to strategies for dealing with the coming four years of Dubya rule, Philip Green confesses to having no appetite for such strategies. "What attitude," he asks, "should the inhabitants of a conquered province have toward their conquerors? In Vichy France, for example, I doubt that the left cared in the slightest about Marshal Pétain's views on old-age pensions, labor unions, soil erosion in the Dordogne, the rights of Algerian immigrants or any similar issues of 'public policy' that might have existed at the time."

What else can explain the lack of what Green calls "any will to resist or defy" the unprecedented outrage of the Supreme Court stealing an election? The lack of such a will in the Democratic Party (with the notable exception of the Congressional Black Caucus) is another story, one that I'll return to. For the rest of us 50 million Americans -- whose votes, we were told by the highest court in the land, simply didn't count -- it can't be simple apathy. How do you oppose the policies of a presidential administration when the U.S. is operating without a legitimate president? How do you participate in a democracy when Rehnquist and the four other thugs on his court -- Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor and Kennedy -- have used the democratic system to nullify the very idea of democracy?

We may, as a nation, have sprung from a revolution, but no matter what fairy tales the hard left is now telling, we are not a revolutionary country. So what do we do? Vincent Bugliosi, the author and prosecutor most famous for putting Charles Manson behind bars, argues that knowledge is power in his slim, trenchant time bomb of a book, "The Betrayal of America." By clearly understanding what the Supreme Court did, we can remove the cloak of respect and legitimacy that shields its actions from protest. Bugliosi's book started out as an article in the Nation last fall, and it received a greater response from readers than any other piece the magazine had ever published. It has been expanded here with a preface by the Nation's editors, forewords by Molly Ivins and Gerry Spence, an introduction by Bugliosi, a series of 20 amplifications on various points made in the article and a summary of the legal proceedings that climaxed in the Supreme Court's Dec. 12 ruling in Bush vs. Gore.

The article's original title reveals Bugliosi's intent: "None Dare Call It Treason." Always grounded in the law but using the harshest language he can muster, hectoring and ridiculing where he deems it necessary, Bugliosi outlines his case. He argues that in stopping the Florida recount and effectively handing the election to George W. Bush (which was clearly, he claims, their intent), the five conservative justices engaged in criminal conduct bordering on treason. Bugliosi claims that the only reason their action isn't legally treason is that Congress "never dreamed of enacting a statute making it a crime to steal a presidential election."

Next Page: Why who actually won doesn't matter

• View blog reactions