Kansas Crimson

Cassandra wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 12:11 pm This idea that Trump was going to be off the ballet in any state is hilarious.

Cassandra wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 12:11 pm This idea that Trump was going to be off the ballet in any state is hilarious. Just shows you how far our society has fallen from looking at factual evidence and law and instead replaced it with feelings and interpretations. We must remove democracy to save democracy is funny.

If you pick up your copy of the Constitution, as I have just done, you can see that its plain language forbids Donald Trump from running for office. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is as clear as can be on this point. Anyone who has taken an oath as an officer of government, and then taken part in an insurrection, may not hold any office thereafter.

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Certainly one can have a debate about who should be able to run for office. In our constitutional system, however, a candidate for president must be a U.S. citizen, born in the United States (or to American parents), of a certain age, who has resided in the U.S. for a certain period, and who has not previously been an officer of government and taken part in an insurrection (directly or by giving aid and comfort).

Of those five limitations (citizenship, conditions of birth, age, residence, lack of insurrectionary past), surely the last is the least constricting. The citizenship requirement rules out more than 95% of the people in the world. Birth seems a bit unfair. Its circumstances are not something that people choose. And it excludes people who have actually chosen America by becoming citizens. There are foreign-born citizens who want to run for president, and who would be strong candidates. Age might or might not be reasonable as a limitation — should we really exclude people under 35? And if we do, perhaps we should also exclude people over a certain age?

Compared to these limitations, the ban on insurrectionists seems the least debatable. It involves very few people, has to do with choices they themselves have made, and is motivated more clearly than the other limitations by the protection of constitutional rule as such.

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[People] make [the case] that Trump is not an insurrectionist because he has not been convicted as such in court. I don’t think that this is an argument made in good faith. Trump himself does not contest the facts. Indeed, his purported campaign for president right now is based precisely on his participation in an insurrection, which he advertises in public appearances and in social media.

There are deeper points to be made, though. To read the Constitution in this way, as not executing itself, is to deny it of its basic dignity and purpose. There is also some political common sense to be applied here. When a high officer of the United States takes part in an insurrection, it would be expected that he (in this case it is “he”) would then try to alter lower-court decisions (as Trump in fact has).

In the specific case of section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, the insurrection clause that we are discussing here, it is quite clear that the purpose was to establish a qualification for running for office, not to define a criminal offense. An insurrectionist might or might not also be a convict at the time of an election; either way, he is not eligible to run.

If we believe in the Constitution and in constitutional rule, the issue is clear. Donald Trump cannot run for any federal or state office. We might have strong feelings about this; but the reason we have a Constitution in the first place (and the rule of law in general) is to avoid government by strong feelings.

Donald Trump cannot be a candidate for any state or federal office in the United States of America. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution makes this plain. No office-holding insurrectionist can return to office. The language is clear, and the facts of his case are not in dispute.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled to this effect, and the United States Supreme Court is now called upon to review its finding (in Anderson vs. Griswold). In my last post [above], I addressed arguments against the Constitution that I heard or read in the Midwest over the holidays. In this essay, I address the anti-Constitutional discourse that appears in the media: that the Constitution should be displaced by the fears of people who appear on television.

This form of opposition to the Constitution poses as expertise. It takes the form of advice to the Court: find some way to allow Trump to be on the ballot, because otherwise people will be upset. Because we are used to hearing endless conversations about politics on television, where everyone seems to be a political advisor, it can seem normal to reduce sections of the Constitution to talking points. But we must pause and consider.

In fact, rejecting the legal order in favor of what seems to be politically safe at a given moment is just about the most dangerous move that can be made. It amounts to advocating that we shift from constitutional government to an insurrectionary regime. Indeed, it amounts to participating in that shift, while not taking responsibility for doing so. Let me try to spell this out.

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Every time Trump has run for president, including this time, he has signaled that he would not accept the results if he lost. If he is on the ballot in 2024 and loses, some people will feel resentment. If he is on the ballot and wins, other people will be upset; and Trump will find reasons to make his own people upset. So even if the Constitution were just an anger management pamphlet, nothing would be gained by procrastination.

And much that is very essential would be lost: the rule of law, and the authority of the Supreme Court. In the scenario in which Trump wins, the fact that he was on the ballot will have already discredited the Supreme Court. This makes a Trump administration (or anyone else's in similar circumstances) much more perilous. The counsel of cowardice -- to fear Americans, and to issue judgements on the basis of fear -- is bad not just for the idea of constitutional order, but for the institutions that make it possible, and for the Supreme Court in particular.

To see this, we have to recall how constitutional regimes have been defeated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does the rule of law become something else? First comes the acceptance that one person is not subject to the rule of law, for whatever bad reason -- that he was in office; that he has violent supporters; that he is charismatic; that we are cowards. Once that move is made, once that hole is opened, the person so sanctified as a Leader has been empowered to change the regime itself, and will predictably try to do so.

As that person attempts regime change from a position of executive power, he will (again, utterly predictably) try to discredit the other branches of government, the legislative and the judicial. This will involve mocking them.

We can refer to the familiar example of Germany in the 1930s if we wish, but we need not: this is the pattern in authoritarian transitions all around us right now. The executive (the president, in our system) will claim extensive powers on the basis of existing laws (Trump has already signaled this), and then argue that he personally cannot be restrained by the courts (as Trump's lawyers have argued in another case). After a while, the makers and the interpreters of laws will seem irrelevant, because they are. Checks and balances cease to function, and a constitutional order becomes something else: a dictatorship based on the threat of violence.

The Supreme Court now faces a test. The Constitution says what it says, and the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled as it has ruled: that Trump may not appear on ballots in the state. In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court relied precisely on the arguments that conservative Supreme Court justices claim to accept, arising from the plain language of the Constitution and the intentions of those who wrote its provisions.

Because of the clarity of the language and the explicit commitments of the justices, a failure to affirm the Colorado ruling will be seen as extra-legal, by pretty much everyone.

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There are conservatives who believe in textualism and intentionalism; among them are the legal scholars who have produced the best and clearest arguments in favor of the application of the insurrection clause to Trump. Should the conservative justices of Supreme Court reject their arguments, such conservatives will find themselves in a similar position: they will continue to support the rule of law, but will find it hard to believe that the Supreme Court is doing so.

Elsewhere on the Right, there are people knowingly making the bad arguments I discussed in earlier posts; should the Supreme Court endorse those bad arguments, they will assume that their own cynicism is shared by Supreme Court justices. On the insurrectionist far Right, there is no concern for the rule of law, but rather the belief that everything in the end is a matter of bluster and intimidation. For them, a pitchfork ruling would just be confirmation that waving pitchforks is the right thing to do.

Should the United States Supreme Court fail to uphold the ruling of Colorado Supreme Court, in other words, there will be no group of Americans who will conclude that it has upheld the law. Reasoning from different assumptions and different commitments, almost everyone will find their way to a broad American consensus: the Supreme Court acted from convenience and cowardice. People who are afraid and people who are not afraid; people who threaten and people who do not threaten; people of various legal and political convictions: all would understand such a verdict as a pitchfork ruling.

And here's the rub: correctly.

In a regime change towards authoritarianism, the executive mocks the courts. So it does not help when the courts make themselves laughable. The Supreme Court, in its consideration of Anderson vs. Griswold, risks making a mockery of itself. And ridicule can be an element of an overall political transformation.

The point of sketching out this scenario is not to say that it is inevitable. It is not. The justices of the Supreme Court have choices to make. And our actions matter, no matter what the justices do. But our actions are informed by our concepts.

We should be aware of what sort of politics we are practicing, in the service of what kind of regime. If we think that the Constitution yields to our fears and others’ resentments, we are acting politically, and in a certain direction: we are contributing to an authoritarian transition, where the rule of law is displaced by threats of violence. If we say that the Constitution has a dignity beyond fear and resentment, we are acting politically, in another direction: towards the maintenance and improvement of the rule of law.

Cassandra wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 11:53 am The problem is, you must have an actual charge of insurrection. Without that, it's just "I feel he had an insurrection", which you could say about anyone about anything.

KUTradition wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 12:08 pm lobster, like randi, is an idiot

jfish26 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 11:57 am

Cassandra wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 11:53 am The problem is, you must have an actual charge of insurrection. Without that, it's just "I feel he had an insurrection", which you could say about anyone about anything.

You can say this as many times as you'd like, but there is absolutely not any Constitutional provision requiring a "charge of insurrection" in order for 14A-3 to apply.

KUTradition wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 12:08 pm lobster, like randi, is an idiot

jfish26 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 12:33 pm

KUTradition wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 12:08 pm lobster, like randi, is an idiot

It's just so transparently self-serving.

Say Biden cleared out the judiciary, sold a pardon to Hunter's friend for a billion dollars, and gave "antifa" or BLM security information on how to violently topple Trump's 2025 inauguration (which "antifa" then does). In all cases resigning before he can be impeached and tried.

Are lobster, Randy and the rest going to say that Biden is immune from criminal prosecution? That Biden is not disqualified under 14A-3?

Of course not!

jhawks99 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 12:41 pm Is Cassandra lobster or psych? You can't tell the crazies without a scorecard.

jhawks99 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 1:35 pm Hey Cassandra, what's your take on 911 and the towers collapsing?

Cassandra wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 11:53 am The problem is, you must have an actual charge of insurrection. Without that, it's just "I feel he had an insurrection", which you could say about anyone about anything.