In the 2000 presidential election, neither candidate—Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore—conceived of and pursued a pre-election strategy to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide the outcome of the election. Yet that is what happened in the 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000). That decision was widely condemned and criticized as highly partisan and based on exceedingly weak and inconsistent legal reasoning. It is the type of decision that is vulnerable to the attack that a bare partisan majority first figured out the result it desired and then reasoned backwards to justify it.