"Bush v. Gore is the Supreme Court's worst example of recklessness since the Dred Scott decision in 1857 that said Congress lacked power to ban slavery in the territories. Several justices realized how bad their ruling was. Justice Antonin Scalia reportedly told a colleague that the equal protection reasoning about Florida procedures was "a piece of shit." Scalia, being Scalia, never indicated he regretted it, instead advising critics, "Get over it!" His justification for court intervention, he told an interviewer, was that "we were the laughingstock of the world—the world's greatest democracy couldn't conduct an election." Somehow Scalia—the great constitutional textualist—omitted to cite where in the Constitution he had unearthed a "laughingstock of the world" clause that allowed the court to ignore explicit text that left to Congress the resolution of electoral disputes for the presidency."