Mark Halperin

Absolutely.

Again, these are not stuffy legal issues.

These are the stuff of American life, of business and families.

the relationship between the states and the federal government.

There's so many great stories in the book.

I want to talk about one issue.

I met Justice Scalia twice, only briefly.

And you could see in meeting him in person, anyone who had met him, larger than life, and in a slightly different era in Washington, the ability to be close friends with somebody like Justice Ginsburg, who he was ideologically different from.

I want to talk about Bush versus Gore, which is the way you deal in the – this is the dividing point between this volume and the next.

Because almost everyone I know who knew Justice Scalia on the right, who admired him, said, you know, very principled guy, believed in a very clear, principled way of judging rather than on politics.

I consider Bush versus Gore to be one of the decision to be one of the biggest abominations for anyone who wants to contend that the justices are not result oriented.

All five Republican-nominated justices voted to give George Bush the presidency.

All four liberal justices voted no to defer to the state court in Florida.

What Justice Scalia and his four colleagues did was they said the Florida Supreme Court said there should be a recount, and they said no.

The federal government's going to tell Florida how they should run this election in their state.

That is antithetical.

In my understanding of the law, and I'm not a lawyer either, but I've studied this case a lot, it's antithetical to what I believe Justice Scalia would normally say, which is normally he'd say defer to the states.

The federal court should not tell Florida how to run their election.

How did he defend that decision?

How do you explain that decision except for their politicians?