Let's start with the November ruling by Denver District Court judge Sarah B. Wallace that the Very Stable Genius could indeed appear on the ballot when Colorado has its primary.
She based her reasoning on something that, with my limited knowledge of constitutional law, looks pretty damn iffy:
In a 102-page ruling, Wallace accepted many of the plaintiffs’ core claims about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, and rejected arguments from Trump’s legal team that his messages to his supporters, including incendiary social media posts and a speech at the White House Ellipse just prior to the violence at the Capitol, were protected speech under the First Amendment.
“The Court concludes … that Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 and therefore ‘engaged’ in insurrection within the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” Wallace wrote.
But because of this, she came to the conclusion she did:
But Wallace ultimately sided with a legal theory, put forward by several conservative scholars and cited by Trump’s attorneys, holding that Section 3’s reference to individuals who have “taken an oath … as an officer of the United States” does not include the presidency.
“After considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States’ did not include the President of the United States,” Wallace wrote. “It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”
The Colorado Supreme Court's opposing reasoning seems pretty straightforward to me:
“President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” the court’s majority opinion said. “Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”
That said, it's worthy of note that the four justices in the majority were all appointed by Democratic governors. Also that the case was initiated by the decidedly left-leaning Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington.
You can be sure that the drool-besotted leg-humpers are going to make sure those facts are front and center in the public's understanding. More generally, the Republican Party, as exemplified by Ronna McDaniel and Elise Stefaniak, as well as many of the also-ran presidential candidates, has already started beating that drum.
That, in turn, will join the Peter Strzok - Lisa Page saga, the pee tape, James Comey's inscrutability and undeniable mainstream media bias as MAGA-land substantiation that the long knives are out everywhere you look, and the figure at the center of it all will play it up to the hilt at his rallies and in his Truth Social posts.
It's going to be very interesting indeed to see how the federal Supreme Court handles this. It may be driven by the urgency of the deadline for Colorado printing its ballots. But it's important to remember that the Court, in its current makeup, is comprised mostly of serious originalists and textualists. They're not driven, the assertions of Acela Corridor pundits to the contrary, by an ideological agenda. For instance, Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization was not decided on the basis of an opportunity for a gotch, but rather on the fact that Roe v Wade had been decided on so-flimsy-as-to-be-extra-consitutional grounds. Legal scholars, such as John Hart Ely and Edward Lazarus at the time Roe was decided even said so.
Then again, if SCOTUS upholds the Colorado Supreme Court ruling, look for other states to toss Trump off their primary ballots.
What we can say about this situation is that it ought to brace us for a 2024 so raw, so ugly, so chaotic, that we may well look back on this year as a downright stable time.
I agree. Strange times….
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