Supreme Court Delivers Partisan Bush v. Gore Decision with Corporate Legal Team Involvement

The Supreme Court issued a controversial 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore that effectively awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Republican candidate George W. Bush, ensuring his victory over Al Gore. The unsigned per curiam decision reversed a Florida Supreme Court request for a selective manual recount, demonstrating clear conflicts of interest among conservative justices. Justice O’Connor became upset at an election night party when Gore was reported to have won Florida, with her husband explaining they would have to wait another four years before retiring to Arizona. Clarence Thomas’s wife was intimately involved in the Bush campaign, helping to draw up lists of Bush appointees while her husband adjudicated whether Bush would become president. Antonin Scalia’s son worked for the firm appointed by Bush to argue his case before the Supreme Court. The Bush legal team included future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, then a 28-year-old associate dispatched to Florida to help rescue Republican absentee ballots. Legal scholars have called it ’the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history’ because the majority justices decided based on the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants rather than legal principles.