More Than 78 ‘Friends’ Of The Supreme Court Offer Advice On The 14th Amendment And Trump’s Eligibility

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1480007
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It is (should be) amazing that Trump’s claims of immunity are taken seriously, and claims that the 14th amendment doesn’t disqualify him are taken seriously.

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With friends like these, who needs enemas?

Unless these ‘friends’ are Heritage folks, the court won’t even consider the briefs. Bet on it. They’ve already decided, even before the lower court issued an opinion.

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I take issue with this statement, “ But without any doubt, this case is monumental – likely more consequential than Bush v. Gore, which decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election in George W. Bush’s favor.”

That utterly misguided decision, where the five Republican “justices” cut off counting ballots in part because it could cause irreparable harm to W, crossed a judicial Rubicon and solidified a checkered history of the SC behaving as a partisan political and not a dispassionate judicial body.

It emboldened the far right and opened the way for Republican “justices” to gut the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and opening the floodgates to unlimited anonymous political donations. Just look at Clarence Thomas taking multiple half million dollar vacations from Harlan Crow, and who regularly vacations with Leonard Leo, the mastermind behind the Federalist Society’s take over of large portions of the federal judiciary. Crow and other wealthy and corporate interests heard Clarence’s plea of poverty and desire to live the jet set lifestyle and ponied up the resources to let him live the way he wants if he would only stay on the court (to continue serving their interests.)

But for W there would have been no Iraq War, no ISIS, no Bin Laden or 9/11. Those are direct consequences of the five Republican “justices” appointing George W Bush president. Yes, this case is monumental and let us pray it is not more consequential than the Republican five appointing W president. The American experiment in government of, by and for the people may well not survive another judicial blitzkrieg of that magnitude.

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I’m not convinced that this is true. They might’ve happened but with a different outcome or not at all with Gore at the helm.

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You think Gore would have done what GW Bush did, start a war of choice, by invading Iraq? That might have happened of course, but the chances are about as good as Trump getting hired as the prima ballerina in the NY City Ballet.

No Iraq means no Paul Bremer, who summarily, foolishly and arrogantly disbanded the Iraq Army by fiat, the senior leadership of which effectively created ISIS. Bin Laden’s original beef was with non-Muslim military forces controlling a Muslim nation, and especially non-Muslim military forces having bases in Saudi Arabia, home to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca - that was a sacrilege that could not be tolerated. That led to 9/11.

Ultimately it goes back to America and the West’s insatiable appetite for cheap oil, which is why the Texas oil man Bush orchestrated the invasion of Kuwait - to oust Saddam Hussein - and then chose to conquer Iraq as a way to control its oil riches.

Thus, I think it fair to say “ But for W there would have been no Iraq War, no ISIS, no Bin Laden or 9/11.”

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Just the opposite. But here’s the thing:

Would the imminent attack on 9/11 have been foiled because people who knew what they were doing were paying attention to the underground?

This is a whole ‘road not taken’ scenario for which we can never, ever know the true outcome. It’s all speculation. Hell, we’re assuming Gore would’ve been better than W, but who knows when and where something ELSE might’ve happened that would’ve been far worse.

We can just never know the alternate universe where Gore won. We just can’t.

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I have to agree with edgarant. 9/11 would not have happened with Gore because he would not have been in Texas ignoring all the “hair on fire” presidential daily briefings and Gore would not have ignored Clinton’s transition team with their 'hair on fire" intelligence concerns about Saddam Hussain wanting to attack the US and he would not have picked a vice president who walked into office with detailed plans to split up the Iraqi oil fields among petroleum corporations in the US…

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Agree 100 percent. If the Bush administration could not have orchestrated 9/11 better if they had actually PLANNED 9/11.

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I don’t believe they planned it, but they sure did take advantage of the situation.

@Bobbin

And we would be a different place on climate change with a President Al Gore, as well as we would still have a budget surplus Clinton passed on when he left office.

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There may has still been a terrorist attack on 9/11 (and a “Bin Laden” as you put it) but the response to it would not have involved invading Iraq. There is no guarantee that there was any actionable difference a Gore administration would have done that could have prevented the attacks on 9/11. It might possibly have been thwarted, but that is some tedious speculation.

The rest of your “what if” I agree with.

I agree that they took advantage of it with “don’t let a good crisis go to waste” being the operative concept. But the notion that the Bush administration “let it happen on purpose” or more directly “planned it” is tin-foil hattery (and that’s being charitable) particularly the latter.

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The four elements I listed - Iraq War, ISIS, Bin Laden and 9/11 - are not independent of one another but a cascading series of cause and effect relationships. The Iraq War was a war of choice (okay, to be fair, Dick Cheney’s choice to seize Iraq’s oil for American companies to exploit, but he snookered W into pulling the trigger), and had W not toppled the first domino, none of the others would have fallen into being.

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Matt Gaetz; least self-aware Mann the planet?

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But there absolutely was actionable evidence, as you put it. It’s called the presidential daily briefing that Bush continually IGNORED. Do you remember when the state department sent someone down to shrub’s brush cleaning site in TexASS and actually read the fucking thing to him aloud? " BIN LADEN POISED TO STRIKE IN US!" And shrub just laughed and said ok, you’ve covered your ass, now go away. Honestly what more “actionable” information do you need?

I suggest you do more research on this and you may change your mind. I’m not a CT guy, but the attack could have been prevented and blaming it all on incompetence of the Bush Administration seems to be wishful thinking.

Here’s the thing - this is why I believe the outcome would be different, had Gore been elected. Had that same PDB been read to Gore, he would have, having had the experience as Veep with Clinton, taken the appropriate action to squelch it.

That doesn’t mean that something else might not have slipped through at a later date. Just saying the scenario you present here is entirely accurate per history.

I maintain that speculation on the road not taken doesn’t help much, BUT I will concede that someone with a bit more experience in the Executive branch of the Federal government might have taken a bit of a different direction in this scenario.

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No there really wasn’t.

And the IC assessment that Bin Laden was determined to stroke in the U.S. is not actionable evidence to know that future highjackers, many of whom who entered the country during the Clinton admisntration, would board airplanes armed with “box cutters” and then proceed to highjack airplanes and flew them into the WTC, Pentagon and (it is believed) the White House.

Since that is not what occurred. First of all, it was not the State Department who briefed the POTUS in Texas on August 17 when he was in Crawford, it was Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, and none of it it had specific actionable threats, despite having over 70 ongoing investigations in Al Deaua and Bin Laden at the tome (i.e. the summer fo 2001).

Most of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports had escalated. Many officials stated that they suspected something terrible was planned, and they were desperate to find out what it was and to stop it. However the threats received contained few specifics regarding time, place, method, or target. Furthermore, most of the IC reports suggested that attacks were planned against targets overseas; others indicated threats against unspecified “U.S. interests.”. Nobody can say for certain at the time whether these reports, as dramatic as they were, related to what later became the 9/11 attacks.

I hate to be defending Bush, as I consider him one of the worst POTUSs we have had (though Trump makes him seem like George Washington by comparison) and a war criminal for what he did with regards to Iraq. But there is no guarantee that a Gore administration somehow would have prevented 9/11, or done anything substantively different up to the morning of September 11th.

I suggest you don’t be presumptive idiot and incorrectly assume I have not delved deeply into the “research”, read the entire 9/11 commission report front to back and and very well versed in the subject.

Then stop peddling CT bullshit.