The Supreme Court cut across partisan lines Thursday to make one concern shared by most of the justices quite clear: They were squeamish about a single state unilaterally disqualifying a candidate for president on the grounds that they engaged in insurrection.
They were squeamish about a single state unilaterally disqualifying a candidate for president on the grounds that they engaged in insurrection.
That’s now how it works. That’s not how any of it works.
Colorado DQ’d him for Colorado. If other states chose to follow suit then that would be their individual choice. If other states chose NOT to follow suit then that would be their individual choice. That’s just Federalism.
It’s a patently ridiculous argument.
Seems ironic with this court that gerrymandering is okay, the Nevada fiasco with excluding candidates from Caucus vs Primaries is okay but by God, when a state steps up to following the US constitution they get their hands slapped. With this kind of logic, this country is deserving of a dictatorship because democracy is obviously failing.
Yes they see what they want to see. “A well regulated militia…”
It’s not well regulated and not all owners of guns are in a militia.
If a single state can’t disqualify someone, I assume the reverse is true, and a single state is all that is required to qualify for the country. So that when Vermin Supreme gets on the ballot in NY, he must automatically be on the ballot in all 50 states.
This is what happens when the cases argued wrong particularly from the start. The Colorado found as a matter of fact, that Trump engaged an insurrection is irrelevant to whether he’s disqualified there or anywhere else. Far more critical is that the US Congress, both the house, and the Senate by a majority vote declared that Trump did engage in insurrection. That’s something that the Supreme Court cannot ignore, and it can also be argued that they have no authority to overrule.
In fact, tomorrow somebody should go back to the Colorado court and have Trump declared disqualified, because Congress said he engaged insurrection. Let them chew on that for a while.
doing so would open a slippery slope in which various state governments disqualified presidential candidates from the opposing party, whittling down the number of states that decide the election to a small few.
Let’s decide this assuming all state governments are corrupt and will be unfair – even though there’s no evidence of either in this case, just the threat of chaos and insurrection – and further assume that each state will play the same political games the feds do.
Best to leave political gamesmanship to the federal experts, like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
O/T but, another one bites the dust.
Yes, let’s keep the dick pic flashing and feet in the mouth in Washington.
This could be good (or at least there’s a distant but non-zero possibility of this being good). Disqualification shouldn’t be a state-by-state call because the tit-for-tat scenario is totally plausible, and we know exactly what gerrymandered southern and western state legislatures are poised to do if given the chance. In the unlikely but not impossible case that this SC decides it wants to disqualify Trump in order to ensure that a less insane (and unindicted) theocrat fascist Republican is on the ballot this November, they will want Trump’s disqualification to be complete and nationwide, a decision with the decisive weight of Bush v Gore, not some incremental act in favor of federalism.
They were squeamish about a single state unilaterally disqualifying a candidate for president on the grounds that they engaged in insurrection.
Could they truly be this stupid?
What other mechanisms exist for disqualifying a candidate for president? Suppose a 33-year-old decided to run for president. Which institution actually implements the disqualification for states to follow? According to today’s questioning, state courts couldn’t do it. The implication is that only the USSC can adjudicate this…so WHY AREN’T THEY NOW? That’s their damn job, by their own declaration.
I swear, this is like calling customer service, being told you’re going to be transferred to tech support, and then tech support telling you they can’t do anything about your problem, you need to talk to someone else, not sure who.
I hope it is not unanimous—ideally giving Trump a contested win here will create a permission structure for the same “umpires” to give him a loss in the immunity appeal.
My guess is that if they go in this direction, it will be by finding that the clause is not self-executing because it would lead to the “absurd” result of states disqualifying people willy-nilly and a patchwork quilt of candidates on or off the ballot in different states.
They will say instead that Congress needs to act. This is comfortable for the liberals, who believe in judicial restraint, and for the conservatives, who will get what they want.
So, Congress gets to vote on whether someone can be kicked off a presidential ballot? Kind of like impeachment? And the current sitting president running for the same office can sign that legislation prohibiting his/her opponent from running?
The answer to the court’s alleged concern about one state disqualifying a candidate is exactly what happened in this case. One state finds a candidate engaged in insurrection and disqualifies that candidate, then that candidate appeals and the Supreme Court decides for all 50 states. That also eliminates their concern about rogue (Republican) legislatures disqualifying candidates (Democrats) on specious grounds -they become the final arbiter of who is and who is not an insurrectionist and thereby disqualified from holding office. The obvious thing to do in this case is to find Trump an insurrectionist and disqualify him from all 50 states. They’re not gonna do that because they’re bought and paid for cowards
Originalist should inform the gun rights folks that muzzle loaders were the guns at the time the Constitution was written meaning they are the only legal guns.
The Court would then emphatically declare that impeachment is a political act, not a legislative act, and has no bearing on the disqualification issue. And it is clearly not a judicial act because that would violate the separation of powers, a concept that only the Court is allowed to violate when it disagrees with the Legislative Branch and rewrites interprets legislation to meet the predetermined result.
This is the most likely scenario, for sure. But I’m still holding out hope that the liberals will want Trump’s instant disqualification nationwide because he tried to end American democracy, and the corrupt hacks and theocrats will want Trump’s instant disqualification nationwide because they think a different Republican is more likely than Trump to succeed!
If some act is ever enacted by Congress defining insurrection in no uncertain terms, the first part of that definition must declare that shameless and endlessly repeated lying, falsification of evidence and grotesque use of partisan communications networks shall not qualify as any defense against a charge of insurrection and such extended and anti-American efforts shall actually provide further evidence that such insurrection was caused by the offenders.
One can dream.
Speaking of “disqualification,” why the hell was Clarence allowed to sit on this case? His wife is knee-deep in insurrection…I’m a bit puzzled.