2024

[Shirley]

I'm so old, I remember when presidents aspired to at least appear to be someone the nation could look up to.

When I first heard about this earlier today, I mistakenly thought it was part 2 of the story jfish told above about Trump pushing a huge stack of documents off a table onto the floor during a deposition because his legal team offered to provide lunch to E Jean Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan and her team.

E Jean Carroll lawyer says Trump used coded version of C-word against her

Roberta Kaplan says ex-president directed ‘See you next Tuesday’ remark at her after deposition in unrelated case at Mar-a-Lago

E Jean Carroll’s attorney says Donald Trump used a coded expression to call her the C-word during a deposition before she helped the magazine columnist win an $83.3m verdict in her defamation case against the former president.

Roberta Kaplan shared the anecdote during an appearance Friday on the George Conway Explains It All podcast, saying it happened while Trump was deposed at his Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an unrelated, since-dismissed case in which he faced accusations of collaborating with a fraudulent marketing company.

As Kaplan told it, at the end of the questioning, Trump’s attorneys ensured the two sides were no longer on the record before he looked at her and remarked: “See you next Tuesday.”

The phrase is well-known, thinly veiled code for perhaps the most offensive misogynistic insult that can be directed at a woman, combining words that sound like the first two letters of the word – “C” and “U” – along with words that start with the letters “N” and “T”.

Kaplan told Conway that she initially didn’t understand the meaning of what Trump said because the opposing sides weren’t scheduled to meet that upcoming Tuesday. “I, thank God, had no idea what that meant, so I said to him, ‘What are you talking about? I’m coming back on Wednesday,’” Kaplan remarked. “Literally, it was an honest answer. I had no idea what he’s talking about.”

[...]

[jhawks99]

Perfect answer though

[zsn]

In this case, I think Occam’s Razor would say that Trump was so out of it that he didn’t have the mental faculties to tell Tuesday and Wednesday apart?

[jfish26]

I'm so old, I remember when presidents aspired to at least appear to be someone the nation could look up to.

When I first heard about this earlier today, I mistakenly thought it was part 2 of the story jfish told above about Trump pushing a huge stack of documents off a table onto the floor during a deposition because his legal team offered to provide lunch to E Jean Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan and her team.

E Jean Carroll lawyer says Trump used coded version of C-word against her

Roberta Kaplan says ex-president directed ‘See you next Tuesday’ remark at her after deposition in unrelated case at Mar-a-Lago

E Jean Carroll’s attorney says Donald Trump used a coded expression to call her the C-word during a deposition before she helped the magazine columnist win an $83.3m verdict in her defamation case against the former president.

Roberta Kaplan shared the anecdote during an appearance Friday on the George Conway Explains It All podcast, saying it happened while Trump was deposed at his Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an unrelated, since-dismissed case in which he faced accusations of collaborating with a fraudulent marketing company.

As Kaplan told it, at the end of the questioning, Trump’s attorneys ensured the two sides were no longer on the record before he looked at her and remarked: “See you next Tuesday.”

The phrase is well-known, thinly veiled code for perhaps the most offensive misogynistic insult that can be directed at a woman, combining words that sound like the first two letters of the word – “C” and “U” – along with words that start with the letters “N” and “T”.

Kaplan told Conway that she initially didn’t understand the meaning of what Trump said because the opposing sides weren’t scheduled to meet that upcoming Tuesday. “I, thank God, had no idea what that meant, so I said to him, ‘What are you talking about? I’m coming back on Wednesday,’” Kaplan remarked. “Literally, it was an honest answer. I had no idea what he’s talking about.”

[...]

Put it in the normalization file.

[jfish26]

This is the most straightforward and compelling case for 14A-3 that I’ve read.

The Objection that Enforcing Section Three is "Undemocratic"

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/03/th ... emocratic/

What about democracy?! We should let the people vote for whomever they want!

Perhaps the most common objection to enforcing Section Three is that doing so would be "undemocratic" in some sense. Taking Section Three seriously, and applying its constitutional disqualification rigorously, it is said, would interfere with the right to vote. It would impair the right of the people to select their own leaders. It would be contrary to democracy. It would be downright unAmerican!

So the charge goes. In reality, this is more a political objection than a truly legal one (though it is sometimes cast in legal terms). It is ultimately an objection to Section Three itself – an objection to what the Constitution says and does. It is at bottom an anti-constitutional argument – an argument for not complying with what the Constitution requires. In the end, the argument, notwithstanding whatever rhetorical appeal it might have, is wholly unpersuasive as a legal matter.

This objection comes in many rhetorical forms:

"Removing an opposition candidate from the ballot," we are told, "through the exercise of judicial power is a remarkably antidemocratic act."

"To bar Mr. Trump from the ballot now would be the wrong way to show him to the exits of the political system, after all these years of strife."

"If the arguments for disqualification are iffy, they should be rejected and the question of Mr. Trump's fitness for office left to the voters to decide."

These are different ways of saying much the same thing. However cast, the substance of the objection is always pretty much the same.

The argument has a certain intuitive appeal: everybody supports "democracy" as an abstract proposition. But all versions of the argument share a common analytic flaw: they beg the relevant legal question entirely.

We begin with first principles. Our democracy is a constitutional democracy. The Constitution both channels and constrains democratic choice, and Section Three is one of those many constraints. It is a fundamental feature of the supreme Law of the Land. Accordingly, once we figure out exactly what constraints Section Three in fact imposes, that should settle the matter. The "democracy" objection is thus a complete red herring. If the Constitution imposes such a disqualification, that is indeed a limitation on voting and democratic choice. But it is a limitation that must be honored in a constitutional republic that imposes specific limitations and checks on the democratic political process.

The fact that the Constitution both channels and constrains democratic choice is evident from many different provisions. The Constitution constrains what government may do. It limits—through its grant of only limited federal powers, through its restrictions on state powers, and through its protection of individual rights—what democratic majorities can do, whether through Congress, through the states, or even through popular referenda. As the Supreme Court memorably put it in the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Constitution removes certain matters "from the vicissitudes of political controversy," placing them "beyond the reach of majorities and officials." Where the Constitution speaks to a question, such matters "may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." No matter how big the electoral majority, the Constitution is higher law that ordinary elections cannot change.

The Constitution's rules governing the elections and the electoral process are likewise supreme law. As to the specific question of eligibility for elected office, the Constitution restricts the right to vote, indirectly, by restricting who is eligible to hold specified elected offices. The President must be at least thirty-five years old. The President must be a "natural born" U.S. citizen, rather than a naturalized immigrant. The President must have been a resident of the United States for 14 years. The President must not have been elected to the presidency twice before. Age, residency, and citizenship restrictions all apply to Senators and Representatives as well.

All of these restrictions limit democratic choice. All of them could be decried as "undemocratic" in that sense. We cannot vote for former presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton because they are disqualified from the presidency by the Twenty-second amendment. We cannot vote for former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger because, having been born in Austria to Austrian parents, he is constitutionally ineligible to be president. We cannot by our votes constitutionally choose a twenty-five year old for president. We cannot select a dead man, or a live dog, to be president, as neither one is a constitutionally eligible "person" within the meaning of the Constitution. All of these provisions limit the right of the people to elect whomever they wish. All of these provisions are in that sense "undemocratic." Are they all equally subject to condemnation in the pages of the New York Times? Are these provisions of the Constitution un-American?

This point runs deeper too. It runs to the structure of presidential elections themselves. In 2016, one of the candidates for President, Hillary Clinton, won a majority of the population's vote for President. But the other candidate, Donald Trump, became President because of the plain rules of the Constitution, which decides the presidency through the electoral college, and thus the electoral vote, even if that is not what a majority of the voters chose. Donald Trump lost the 2016 popular election by almost three million votes, but became President nonetheless because we follow the Constitution, not simple majority votes. That is "undemocratic," in a sense, but it is also basic constitutional law. (The same thing has happened in at least three earlier presidential elections, and there was another in which no candidate had an electoral vote majority.)

While there have been plenty of criticisms of the electoral vote system, virtually nobody denies that it is the law. Right-thinking, law-abiding citizens expected supporters of Hillary Clinton to stand aside and accept the election of Donald Trump, "undemocratic" though it might be, because the law is the law and the rules are the rules and that is the only way for a constitutional democracy to survive. And with a few ignoble exceptions, they did. For Trump's supporters and enablers to turn around now, and demand special exemption from constitutional rules they find inconvenient or undemocratic does not pass basic civics.

The essential problem with the "undemocratic" objection, in all its forms, then, is that it is simply legally irrelevant. It is empty political rhetoric that elides the core legal question of constitutional law: Does Section Three impose a constitutional ban on officeholding that applies in the specific situation at hand? If the answer is yes, we are not at liberty to ignore the Constitution's command – at least not if we purport to be governed by the terms of a written constitution. (Indeed, at least one of the objectors quoted above, Professor Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School, is explicit about this. In the pages of the New York Times he has also written that he seeks to "reclaim American from constitutionalism.")

What is more, these constitutional constraints in fact serve basic democratic functions, and that is especially true of Section Three. As others have pointed out, Section Three's disqualification from office of oath-breaking former officers who subsequently engaged in insurrection against the U.S. Constitution by attempting to overthrow or displace lawful government under the Constitution, is itself a fundamentally democracy-protective provision of our Constitution. It protects lawful United States government under the Constitution, by excluding from power men and women who, as demonstrated by their actions, would overthrow democracy and democratic choice under the Constitution.

Indeed, it is precisely Donald Trump's efforts to upend lawful democratic electoral choice under the Constitution that constitute the gravamen of Trump's disqualification by Section Three. Trump's efforts to overthrow the result of a lawful election and to install himself in office notwithstanding having lost that democratic constitutional election and to thwart, by fraud or by force, the peaceful transition of power to the election's winner, form the core of the factual and legal case for Trump's disqualification. These efforts were profoundly anti-democratic interferences with the processes of constitutional democracy. To decline to enforce Section Three in such circumstances may be the most anti-democratic choice of all.

[…]

In general, the objection that our reading of Section Three is "undemocratic" largely misses the mark. Section Three is a part of our Constitution, means what it means, and does what it does. Whether one thinks that Section Three is in tension with democratic values or, quite the reverse, is fundamentally democracy-protective, Section Three is part of our supreme Law of the Land and should be enforced in accordance with its terms.

The "democracy" objection is really a political objection to following the Constitution because one dislikes what it states. It is an objection to complying with the Constitution – an argument for not following the Constitution, because of political hostility to what the document says and does. As such, we think it fairly described as an "anti-constitutional" argument that has no proper place in legal analysis of the Constitution as a binding, authoritative written legal text.

[ousdahl]

[Sparko]

If Elvis was placed into an evil vat of acid, emerging with only the ability to frown, he still would look better than Trump. And different. The cologne of Hell wafts oppressively off the Yam Yeti--even in Photoshop.

[ousdahl]

Imagine looking in the mirror with that hairdo and thinking, “yea that’s totally the Elvis cut”

[KUTradition]

This is the most straightforward and compelling case for 14A-3 that I’ve read.

The Objection that Enforcing Section Three is "Undemocratic"

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/03/th ... emocratic/

What about democracy?! We should let the people vote for whomever they want!

Perhaps the most common objection to enforcing Section Three is that doing so would be "undemocratic" in some sense. Taking Section Three seriously, and applying its constitutional disqualification rigorously, it is said, would interfere with the right to vote. It would impair the right of the people to select their own leaders. It would be contrary to democracy. It would be downright unAmerican!

So the charge goes. In reality, this is more a political objection than a truly legal one (though it is sometimes cast in legal terms). It is ultimately an objection to Section Three itself – an objection to what the Constitution says and does. It is at bottom an anti-constitutional argument – an argument for not complying with what the Constitution requires. In the end, the argument, notwithstanding whatever rhetorical appeal it might have, is wholly unpersuasive as a legal matter.

This objection comes in many rhetorical forms:

"Removing an opposition candidate from the ballot," we are told, "through the exercise of judicial power is a remarkably antidemocratic act."

"To bar Mr. Trump from the ballot now would be the wrong way to show him to the exits of the political system, after all these years of strife."

"If the arguments for disqualification are iffy, they should be rejected and the question of Mr. Trump's fitness for office left to the voters to decide."

These are different ways of saying much the same thing. However cast, the substance of the objection is always pretty much the same.

The argument has a certain intuitive appeal: everybody supports "democracy" as an abstract proposition. But all versions of the argument share a common analytic flaw: they beg the relevant legal question entirely.

We begin with first principles. Our democracy is a constitutional democracy. The Constitution both channels and constrains democratic choice, and Section Three is one of those many constraints. It is a fundamental feature of the supreme Law of the Land. Accordingly, once we figure out exactly what constraints Section Three in fact imposes, that should settle the matter. The "democracy" objection is thus a complete red herring. If the Constitution imposes such a disqualification, that is indeed a limitation on voting and democratic choice. But it is a limitation that must be honored in a constitutional republic that imposes specific limitations and checks on the democratic political process.

The fact that the Constitution both channels and constrains democratic choice is evident from many different provisions. The Constitution constrains what government may do. It limits—through its grant of only limited federal powers, through its restrictions on state powers, and through its protection of individual rights—what democratic majorities can do, whether through Congress, through the states, or even through popular referenda. As the Supreme Court memorably put it in the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Constitution removes certain matters "from the vicissitudes of political controversy," placing them "beyond the reach of majorities and officials." Where the Constitution speaks to a question, such matters "may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." No matter how big the electoral majority, the Constitution is higher law that ordinary elections cannot change.

The Constitution's rules governing the elections and the electoral process are likewise supreme law. As to the specific question of eligibility for elected office, the Constitution restricts the right to vote, indirectly, by restricting who is eligible to hold specified elected offices. The President must be at least thirty-five years old. The President must be a "natural born" U.S. citizen, rather than a naturalized immigrant. The President must have been a resident of the United States for 14 years. The President must not have been elected to the presidency twice before. Age, residency, and citizenship restrictions all apply to Senators and Representatives as well.

All of these restrictions limit democratic choice. All of them could be decried as "undemocratic" in that sense. We cannot vote for former presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton because they are disqualified from the presidency by the Twenty-second amendment. We cannot vote for former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger because, having been born in Austria to Austrian parents, he is constitutionally ineligible to be president. We cannot by our votes constitutionally choose a twenty-five year old for president. We cannot select a dead man, or a live dog, to be president, as neither one is a constitutionally eligible "person" within the meaning of the Constitution. All of these provisions limit the right of the people to elect whomever they wish. All of these provisions are in that sense "undemocratic." Are they all equally subject to condemnation in the pages of the New York Times? Are these provisions of the Constitution un-American?

This point runs deeper too. It runs to the structure of presidential elections themselves. In 2016, one of the candidates for President, Hillary Clinton, won a majority of the population's vote for President. But the other candidate, Donald Trump, became President because of the plain rules of the Constitution, which decides the presidency through the electoral college, and thus the electoral vote, even if that is not what a majority of the voters chose. Donald Trump lost the 2016 popular election by almost three million votes, but became President nonetheless because we follow the Constitution, not simple majority votes. That is "undemocratic," in a sense, but it is also basic constitutional law. (The same thing has happened in at least three earlier presidential elections, and there was another in which no candidate had an electoral vote majority.)

While there have been plenty of criticisms of the electoral vote system, virtually nobody denies that it is the law. Right-thinking, law-abiding citizens expected supporters of Hillary Clinton to stand aside and accept the election of Donald Trump, "undemocratic" though it might be, because the law is the law and the rules are the rules and that is the only way for a constitutional democracy to survive. And with a few ignoble exceptions, they did. For Trump's supporters and enablers to turn around now, and demand special exemption from constitutional rules they find inconvenient or undemocratic does not pass basic civics.

The essential problem with the "undemocratic" objection, in all its forms, then, is that it is simply legally irrelevant. It is empty political rhetoric that elides the core legal question of constitutional law: Does Section Three impose a constitutional ban on officeholding that applies in the specific situation at hand? If the answer is yes, we are not at liberty to ignore the Constitution's command – at least not if we purport to be governed by the terms of a written constitution. (Indeed, at least one of the objectors quoted above, Professor Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School, is explicit about this. In the pages of the New York Times he has also written that he seeks to "reclaim American from constitutionalism.")

What is more, these constitutional constraints in fact serve basic democratic functions, and that is especially true of Section Three. As others have pointed out, Section Three's disqualification from office of oath-breaking former officers who subsequently engaged in insurrection against the U.S. Constitution by attempting to overthrow or displace lawful government under the Constitution, is itself a fundamentally democracy-protective provision of our Constitution. It protects lawful United States government under the Constitution, by excluding from power men and women who, as demonstrated by their actions, would overthrow democracy and democratic choice under the Constitution.

Indeed, it is precisely Donald Trump's efforts to upend lawful democratic electoral choice under the Constitution that constitute the gravamen of Trump's disqualification by Section Three. Trump's efforts to overthrow the result of a lawful election and to install himself in office notwithstanding having lost that democratic constitutional election and to thwart, by fraud or by force, the peaceful transition of power to the election's winner, form the core of the factual and legal case for Trump's disqualification. These efforts were profoundly anti-democratic interferences with the processes of constitutional democracy. To decline to enforce Section Three in such circumstances may be the most anti-democratic choice of all.

[…]

In general, the objection that our reading of Section Three is "undemocratic" largely misses the mark. Section Three is a part of our Constitution, means what it means, and does what it does. Whether one thinks that Section Three is in tension with democratic values or, quite the reverse, is fundamentally democracy-protective, Section Three is part of our supreme Law of the Land and should be enforced in accordance with its terms.

The "democracy" objection is really a political objection to following the Constitution because one dislikes what it states. It is an objection to complying with the Constitution – an argument for not following the Constitution, because of political hostility to what the document says and does. As such, we think it fairly described as an "anti-constitutional" argument that has no proper place in legal analysis of the Constitution as a binding, authoritative written legal text.

is “basic civics” even taught anymore?

i took it in jr. high (i think it was mandatory), but i wouldn’t at all be surprised if it’s fallen by the wayside

[Shirley]

I think they still teach civics but now it's called "Deep State Grooming."

I could be wrong.

[Sparko]

Grooming. Like the MAGA mindhive. It is always projection. Always.

[DCHawk1]

Oops.

[KUTradition]

lmao

[jfish26]

One thing I hadn’t really considered: majorities of both chambers of Congress already found that Trump engaged in an insurrection.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/08/opinions ... index.html

Those votes came in the second impeachment of Trump, in January and February of 2021, in which majorities of both the House and the Senate backed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.”

This was a finding of fact, by majorities of our elected representatives, after a full public trial in which Trump was able to mount a defense — and it should be deemed persuasive, if not conclusive, in answering the factual questions before the Supreme Court. Indeed, for the more right-wing justices, who are often fond of pontificating that courts should not make policy judgments and should instead defer to legislatures, one would think that such a clear public pronouncement from Congress on Trump’s engagement in insurrection would be a compelling precedent.

To be clear, the 14th Amendment does not actually require anyone to have voted to disqualify an insurrectionist, whether that’s a legislature or a jury. It certainly does not require a conviction, as some have tried to argue (and such bastardization of the plain language of a constitutional provision is exactly the opposite of what conservatives normally preach).

[twocoach]

One thing I hadn’t really considered: majorities of both chambers of Congress already found that Trump engaged in an insurrection.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/08/opinions ... index.html

Those votes came in the second impeachment of Trump, in January and February of 2021, in which majorities of both the House and the Senate backed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.”

This was a finding of fact, by majorities of our elected representatives, after a full public trial in which Trump was able to mount a defense — and it should be deemed persuasive, if not conclusive, in answering the factual questions before the Supreme Court. Indeed, for the more right-wing justices, who are often fond of pontificating that courts should not make policy judgments and should instead defer to legislatures, one would think that such a clear public pronouncement from Congress on Trump’s engagement in insurrection would be a compelling precedent.

To be clear, the 14th Amendment does not actually require anyone to have voted to disqualify an insurrectionist, whether that’s a legislature or a jury. It certainly does not require a conviction, as some have tried to argue (and such bastardization of the plain language of a constitutional provision is exactly the opposite of what conservatives normally preach).

Very true. That removes the need for the Supreme Court to decide whether he did or not when Congress has already decided that he did.

[Cassandra]

Scotus is not going to side with Colorado, simply because they understand what precedent that sets if they did. You take Trump off a ballet, then that opens up any state like Florida, Texas, Arizona to kick Biden off. It's not a door they want to open, and neither should anyone.

[jfish26]

Scotus is not going to side with Colorado, simply because they understand what precedent that sets if they did. You take Trump off a ballet, then that opens up any state like Florida, Texas, Arizona to kick Biden off. It's not a door they want to open, and neither should anyone.

I, personally, would tend to agree that interpreting the Constitution should be in the scope of federal courts (and that one of the very purposes of federal appellate courts is to resolve inconsistencies in how the several states interpret the Constitution).

However, I'm sure you are aware that this general idea is NOT how various advocacy groups that are more aligned with your views than mine see this issue as relating to things like marriage, voting, privacy, guns, etc.

[Sparko]

Trump is disqualified by act of insurrection validated in both houses of Congress. Lincoln's proclamation should have been revisited 20 January 2021 at 2pm or so. Biden has been too passive for sure.


Edit: I keep fat fingering dates. Grrr

[Cassandra]

Today is the day that all this "insurrection" nonsense dies. Trump will be on the ballet in every state.

[Overlander]

Trump will be on the ballet in every state.

Sneaking into dressing rooms for a look?