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"    My pal Scott Lemieux, who blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, has a piece in the American Prospect about Justice Antonin Scalia&amp;#039;s appearance the other night with Piers Morgan in the Larry King Memorial Crypt on CNN. Mr. Justice Short Time is plugging a new book and, as part of having to deal with one of the seven billion-odd people on Earth whom he knows is not as smart as he is, Scalia started rattling on about Bush v. Gore, the case in which he took whatever credibility he ever had as a jurist and used it for skeet practice. Lemieux flags a salient exchange: SCALIA: Contentious? Well, I guess the one that, you know, created most-most waves of disagreement was Bush v. Gore, OK? That comes up all the time. And my usual response is get over it. MORGAN: Get over the possible corrupting of the American presidential system? MORGAN: Justice Scalia? SCALIA: Look it, I-my court didn&amp;#039;t-didn&amp;#039;t bring the case into the court. It was brought into the courts by Al Gore. He is the one who wanted courts to decide the question which-when Richard Nixon thought that he had lost the election because of chicanery in Chicago, he chose not to bring it into the courts. But Al Gore wanted the courts to decide it. So the only question in Bush v. Gore was whether the presidency would be decided by the Florida Supreme Court or by the United States Supreme Court. That was the only question, and that&amp;#039;s not a hard one. MORGAN: No regrets? SCALIA: Oh, no regrets at all, especially since it&amp;#039;s clear that the thing would have ended up the same way anyway. The press did extensive research into what would have happened if what Al Gore wanted done had been done county by county, and he would have lost anyway. Scott emphasizes the fact that Scalia is clearly wrong about what would have happened &amp;quot;anyway.&amp;quot; But there is so much ahistorical gibberish in that answer that there&amp;#039;s plenty left over for the rest of us. And it all more clearly emphasizes Lemieux&amp;#039;s point that Scalia&amp;#039;s role in Bush v. Gore was purely that of a political partisan. If, 12 years after handing the country over to the Avignon Presidency, you&amp;#039;re still dealing in cheap talking points that people mustered up in the extended autumn of 2000, you&amp;#039;re tipping yourself off rather obviously. 1) Al Gore &amp;quot;Wanted The Courts To Decide&amp;quot;: Actually, it was the Republicans who filed the first court case in Florida, and it was the Republicans and Jim Baker who wanted it fast-tracked through the federal court system, even though even some of them thought it was a longshot, because they clearly had no idea what a good Republican Antonin Scalia really was. Scalia, and the rest of the Supreme Court stepped in after Gore had won in the Florida state courts. The idea that Gore wanted &amp;quot;the courts&amp;quot; to decide this in the manner in which the Supreme Court hijacked the case is ludicrous. 2) The Nixon Didn&amp;#039;t Go To Court Legend: This was bandied about almost from the start, and it is in a very narrow sense true. Nixon didn&amp;#039;t go to court. That was because, in those halcyon days, not even the hardest of hardcore Republicans thought the Supreme Court ever would get involved in something that the Constitution clearly demonstrated was an area in which the states were sovereign. However, Thruston Morton, the Republican National chairman, mounted a nationwide campaign of recounts that went on well into the winter of 1960. Nixon, the noble loser, is a delightful fairy tale that conservatives tell their children at bedtime. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14945/scalia-interview-10818968/>