The Minnesota Supreme Court cleared the way on Wednesday for Trump to run in the state’s Republican primary next year, deferring a ruling on whether the Constitution’s Disqualification Clause renders him ineligible to be on the general election ballot.
Patience is again required, but with the USSC involved…hmmmm
Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee and he will be on all 50 state ballots and the District of Colombia.
But it is good politics, and therefore I support the effort, to try and bar Trump from being certain state ballots. It keeps the narrative open and makes Trump and Republicans pay a price in 2024 for their 2020 insurrection and refusal to recognize (admit) Joe Biden’s victory.
My first reaction is that this is unfair to Republicans, who must now continue trying to plan with and around TRUMP’s quantum candidacy.
DQing their candidate in the general election would obviously make it difficult for them to organize around a new candidate in time to mount a decent campaign. If the GOP did that to Dems, we’d be right to be up in arms (and, indeed, I do expect Organized Money to throw disruptions into the Dem machine at a deliberately late date).
But, “the court found that the state party presidential primary is an ‘internal party election to serve internal party purposes,’ merely administered by the Secretary of State,” which seems reasonable to me.
And nobody is forcing the GOP to run a candidate who is uniquely vulnerable to many kinds of legal kryptonite that could annihilate his candidacy overnight at any stage of the election. Nobody forced them to transform their party into a deadly cult of personality that would be rudderless if their one superstar gets hit by a bus.
They have 1000 off-ramps, so I have zero sympathy.
Word-parsing aside…
So, let him win the nomination … and then disqualify him.
That should be fun to watch.
It’s plausible that by the time a ruling is needed there will have been developments in other cases that the court can take notice of 
Josh–thanks for the clear, cogent explanation of the Minnesota SC’s decision.
Fun for the whole family : - )
Push it back until the evening of the inauguration! Remember, the higher the degree of difficulty, the higher the point value if you stick the landing!
I give it about 2 weeks before someone files the paperwork for their 3 year old to be in the Republican primary.
Why not a three-year-old elephant calf?
Minnesota Supreme Court: “2024 is too early”
Minnesota Supreme Court (a short time later) “Now that he’s the official candidate, it’s too late”.
For now, the court found that the state party presidential primary is an “internal party election to serve internal party purposes,” merely administered by the Secretary of State.
‘Merely administered’? Doesn’t that administration given rise to a natural presumption on the part of an average voter that the state agrees with the party that the candidate meets the required standards: Age, citizenship and not having participated in an insurrection after having sworn an
oath to the United States?
If a party wishes to nominate an unqualified candidate let them do so as a private matter without the state’s imprimatur and assistance. They can revert to choosing their candidate by conventions or conduct their own primaries.
Punt.
Pet Rock 2024.
“It hasn’t been indicted.”
good decision. Trump is accused of being an insurrectionist, and many people feel that they watched it in real time and have heard them brag about it. But he hasn’t been found guilty of it yet. Plus, he isn’t the candidate yet. Once found guilty, they can do it the next day. If he isn’t found guilty, then they need to spend their time and effort getting out the vote to defeat him. In fact, they should start today.
I find it hard to see this decision as anything but a practically irrevocable abdication by the court of any role in 14.3 disqualification.
They left open the possibility of coming back to the issue if and when Trump gets the R nomination in Minnesota that the plaintiffs were trying to block, but at that point deciding that he is disqualified would leave the Rs stuck with a nominee who can’t appear on the ballot. This makes sense only if your aim is to give the R senators and House members at the 2025 joint session an excuse to nullify the election result, or SCOTUS an excuse to nullify your decision because the rules under which the election is to be conducted should be settled law before the process begins.
Guys, I realize this is an unpopular, even contrarian opinion, hear me out while I ramble my way through my argument about why I continue to believe that though the disqualification effort is legally meritorious, it would be politically and morally disastrous if it succeeded in removing Donald Trump (though not candidates for lesser offices) from the ballot in any state. Because we are way past the point when the law alone can save us from Donald Trump. Every point when it could have done so was squandered and now only democracy can save itself and the rule of law alike.
The law had decades to save the world and democratic governance from Trump’s malignancy. His reeking, putrescent slime trail of rape, extortion, bribery, and fraud was there for all to see and smell and no one charged with enforcing the law bothered because he had instinctively identified the points of corruption that always exists at the interface of law and power, and, perceiving them as the reality of the whole system, manipulated them with the innate expertise only a Cluster B personality disorder confers. The last point of when the letter of the law and legal process could save us without damaging the already fragile fabric of democracy were the two impeachments. The shameful decades of failure to hold him to account when it could be done in a manner and at a time that did not reek of desperate fear he could win again necessarily took us past the point when rule of law could save democracy to the place where only democracy can save the rule of law.
All of the indictments and the civil action are critically necessary because democracy cannot save rule of law unless the law finally manages to make some effort to save itself, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves because we are in an historical crisis, not a legal crisis. And not a “crisis” in the sense of a dangerous period of limited duration like the Cuban Missile Crisis,
No, I mean an historical epoch when the shit just keeps coming for years and years, if not decades. And I’m not going to lie, if Roman history is any guide, those kinds of crises tend to…end up working out poorly for the advocates of popular sovereignty. The protracted political crisis of of the First Century BCE ended the Roman Republic. The environmental, epidemiological, political, and social disaster post-enlightenment historians call the Crisis of the Third Century turned emperors into what Caligula was assassinated for claiming to be: a divine absolute autocrat. Neither precedent bodes well for the continued survival and success of liberty.
Fortunately for us, it’s 2023 CE and we’re not Rome, history rhymes rather and predicts or predetermines and our history is one coming out of periods of backlash to demographic change and progress on advancing the ideals upon which the nation claims to be founded the better for having survived them. But yes, we must both acknowledge that we are in a crisis and that the crisis bears some deeply unsettling similarities to each of the two multi-decade crises that extinguished liberty in Rome to profit from the examples.
And one way that crisis is manifesting is that every single election for some years past and continuing into the foreseeable future has been and will be a referendum on the continuation of democracy itself. Every election is and will be about whether we have had enough with all the effort and strain of maintaining democracy and are ready to just hand over power to the would-be oligarchs, theocrats and creepy neo-monarchists bent on its destruction. Every election for years to come will present that choice and we only need lose once to lose it all. Democracy will survive only if the people will it. The people, from whose consent our creed says governments derive their just power, must will its continued continuance, election after election after election, in the face of the endless efforts of its opponents to use the law to destroy it with voter suppression and gerrymandering and cynical judicial activism.
That’s the stakes in every election going forward and it is the only goddamn issue that matters now. “Who are the candidates and or party with a realistic chance of winning a majority who are for majority rule?” That’s it. Sucks to be you if you’re motivated by economic, emotional, or ideological concerns or issues that are only important to a minority, but you can either suck it up and face it or liberty dies. Yeah, it means democracy is not going to work the way it did when back when we had two major parties that were good faith participants in the project of democratic governance whether in or out of power and had a shared commitment to a national interest that transcended party and ideology. Instead, it means every election you have to decide whether you still have a commitment to country and to the survival of liberty that supersedes ideology or interest.
That’s how it is now because that’s what it means to be in an historical crisis. It is, to coin a phrase, very, very unfair. We must now bear a burden as voters and citizens our parents didn’t–or at least could afford to think they didn’t. You can’t whine, deny, ignore, imagine, or wish your way out of it. It means voting for people who didn’t give you, and may never give you, everything you wanted. It means voting for people whose behavior can’t be changed by your threat to withhold–and especially your actual withholding of–your vote because if that’s who you are, you’re already allied to the enemies of democracy and stupidly believe right wing minority won’t put you in a camp or an unmarked grave.
It sucks. It sucks so bad you may be tempted to construct alternate realities for yourself where your vote doesn’t matter because you live in a blue state anyway, or where your issues are really, really popular if you look at polls you otherwise claim not to believe in a certain way. Or where Bothsides are exactly the same, either both morally and politically equivalent or part of a “duopoly” of equally corrupt actors that must be destroyed.
And, again, if that’s where you are, you might as well go design the spiffy uniform you’ll wear under the new order and make lists of all the people you’ll kill after the revolution or something and get the hell out of our way because we’re done pretending you’re not the enemies of the Democratic Party you proclaim yourself to be, no matter how hard you cry when we do.
But as for the rest of us who can face up to the duty and necessity of hanging on to democracy in the crisis, all of this is why it is crucial that Trump not be kept off the ballot by means of novel legal arguments grounded in untested legal theory. If he fucks up and doesn’t get his filing papers in on time or some other technical error on his part, sure. But–and this is where I finally ramble to my way to the tl;dr–if he is kept off the ballot of any state by the Insurrection Clause now, it delegitimizes the thesis of democratic governance that is now at stake in every election.
Yes, I think the Insurrection Clause theory is legally correct. As a matter of law alone, he should be disqualified. I agree with Tribe and Posner and the legal deep thinkers on that. But you need to understand that the eminent legal scholars and thinkers promoting it are, in fact, lawyers. Lawyers giving in to the lawyerly predisposition to treat every problem as a nail that can be fixed by the only tool in our one-tool toolbox.
But the sickness eroding democracy isn’t a legal problem and treating it like one is telling the authoritarians: “like you, we don’t trust or believe in democracy either and, like you, we are so afraid of the consequences of people expressing their will that we will resort to legal chicanery to ‘save’ the country.”
Because, let’s be honest, isn’t that what we’re afraid of? Isn’t that why so many people are so fervently in favor of disqualifying him under the 14th? Because we recoil from the strain of weary years and decades of fighting this fight and want a magic fix? Because we’re all so terribly scared he’ll win and then destroy democracy and rule of law alike? Because we think democracy is so fragile now we must save it from itself for its own good?
Well thing is, that fragility, the very fact that we are on the brink of losing democracy, is the problem that renders the correctness of the legal theory quite irrelevant. It would be fine to DQ people running for lesser offices for participating in Jan 6, but at this point in time we cannot save democracy–and thus save rule of law–by using the courts and the law to undermine democracy, undermine the right of the people to decide, yet again, whether government of, by and for the people will perish in the only truly national election we have.
Let’s face the harsh reality: democracy is already broken. A democracy where one of the two major parties (or coalitions-this isn’t two-party democracy format problem) is openly anti-democracy, has abandoned even hypocritical lip service allegiance to majority rule, is, paradoxically, not actually a functioning democracy anymore. I’ve been chewing on that paradox for years, and the only road out it I can see is more paradox. That is, I think the only path to the return of functional democracy is to for the pro-democracy party to win again and again and again until the other side is forced to accept that there is no path back to power other than actually proposing, supporting and advancing policies, not fearmongering and symbol-humping and lies but real policies, that are widely popular.
And right now, that means beating the would-be dictator not in the courts, but at the ballot box, yet again. And then go on beating whatever other men on horseback and charlatans and rabble-rousing haters they put up again and again until they accept there is no path to power other than through the will of the majority.
Yes, it’s perilous. Yes, the billionaires have managed to subvert the courts and legislatures in many states–Ohio is the prime example–to the point that the majority there may be thwarted and fighting that is in part work for lawyers. Yes, there are too many people who can only learn not to stick their faces into a grindstone by doing it. But there’s no way out of this mess other than voting it down. In political cases, we cannot make people submit to the law unless the law is backed by the manifest will of the people as expressed at the polls. And that’s why it’s crucial that Trump be on the ballot in every state. Even the ones he can’t possibly win. Reject him again, for the third time, and then and only then throw his ass in prison with the other monsters if he’s convicted in the pending cases.