Friday, December 22, 2023
Thursday, December 21, 2023
Colorado Just Gave Republicans An Exit Ramp
In fact, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is self-executing, which means that congressional action is not required. Nor is it required that the former president be convicted of the criminal offense of an insurrection or rebellion against the United States under Title 18 USC 2383.
The Constitution itself tells us that disqualification of the former president is not anti-democratic. Rather, the Constitution tells us that it is the conduct that can give rise to disqualification under the 14th Amendment that is anti-democratic.
This is not politics. This is the opposite of politics. This is constitutional law. And right now, the courts — the state courts and eventually the Supreme Court — will be interpreting the Constitution of the United States without regard to politics, let alone partisan politics.
I am confident that the Supreme Court would affirm Colorado Supreme Court’s decision based upon the objective law, which in this instance is Section 3 of the 14th amendment. Which is to say that I know that the Colorado Supreme Court decision is unassailable in every single respect under the Constitution of the United States. . . . I believe that this Supreme Court will affirm the Colorado Supreme Court if it takes this case for review.
Luttig's faith in the U.S. Supreme Court may be misguided, but the whole issue raised by the Colorado ruling should be enough for sane and moral Republicans seize upon to purge the stench of Trump from the GOP, A piece in The Atlantic by a conservative former Republican looks at the exit ramp that has been offered to the Republican Party:
“The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary,” John Kenneth Galbraith wrote. “No economist should be denied it, and not many are.”
I’m not an economist. But I was wrong about the litigation to bar Donald Trump from the ballot as an insurrectionist. I wrote in August that the project was a “fantasy.” Now, by a 4–3 vote, the Colorado Supreme Court has converted fantasy into at least temporary reality.
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, and who then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same,” is forbidden to hold any federal or state office unless pardoned by a vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress.
According to Colorado’s court, his actions leading up to the violent coup attempt of January 6, 2021, amounted to “engaging in” an insurrection. Therefore, the court ruled earlier today, Trump is disqualified from appearing on the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.
The U.S. Supreme Court now has the opportunity to offer Republicans an exit from their Trump predicament, in time to let some non-insurrectionist candidate win the Republican nomination and contest the presidency.
The Colorado court has invited the U.S. political system away from authoritarian disaster back to normal politics—back to a race where the Biden-Harris ticket faces more or less normal opponents, rather than an ex-president who openly yearns to be a dictator.
The Colorado Supreme Court harshly condemned Trump personally. It ruled him an insurrectionist, in effect a traitor. It joined his name to the roster of the Confederate rebels whom the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment wanted to ban from politics. And at the same time, that court offered emancipation from Trump to Trump’s party.
The polls seem to indicate that Americans’ preferences for 2024 stack up as follows: Trump will probably lose to Biden, but almost any other Republican would likely beat the current president.
Republicans who want to win in 2024 were just delivered a big favor, if they will accept it: a state supreme court ruling that their weakest general-election candidate is disqualified from running in the primaries where his too-loyal base is not emoting, not thinking.
If upheld by the Supreme Court, the Colorado court’s decision might yet save the GOP from itself. Will the GOP consent to be rescued?
Since Trump made his comments about wanting to be a dictator for a day, some Republicans have argued that there’s nothing to fear, because the institutions will stop him: The military won’t obey the illegal orders Trump has said he’ll issue; the Department of Justice won’t prosecute the authoritarian cases Trump says he wants to bring. For those Republicans: Here’s your chance. The Colorado court has just granted you what should be your fondest wish, a clear path to the Republican nomination for a post-Trump candidate.
Until now, Trump’s Republican rivals have shown themselves too scared to fight and too weak to win. The question ahead: Are they too scared and too weak even when the win is presented to them by the courts? The immediate reaction of many of them was, as usual, to cower and truckle—to take Trump’s side against their own. This is their last exit; if they drive past, there will not be another before the primaries finish.
The present Supreme Court is highly attuned to the wishes of conservative America. If the conservative majority senses permission from Republicans to save Republicans from themselves, they might do it. If they sense a veto from Republicans, they may not. What is said and done in the next days and hours may matter a great deal. If Republicans want rescue, they must stop pretending they object.
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
Trump Disqualified from Colorado’s 2024 Ballot
In a historic decision Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court barred Donald Trump from running in the state’s presidential primary after determining that he had engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
The 4-3 ruling marked the first time a court has kept a presidential candidate off the ballot under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office. The ruling comes as courts consider similar cases in other states.
If other states reach the same conclusion, Trump would have a difficult — if not impossible — time securing the Republican nomination and winning in November.
The decision is certain to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it will be up to the justices to decide whether to take the case. Scholars have said only the nation’s high court can settle for all states whether the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol constituted an insurrection and whether Trump is banned from running.
“A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the decision reads. “Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”
The U.S. Supreme Court justices separately are weighing a request from special counsel Jack Smith to expedite consideration of Trump’s immunity claim in one of his criminal cases — his federal indictment in Washington on charges of illegally trying to obstruct President Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s majority determined the trial judge was allowed to consider Congress’s investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which helped determine that Trump engaged in insurrection.
“We conclude that the foregoing evidence, the great bulk of which was undisputed at trial, established that President Trump engaged in insurrection,” the majority wrote.
In its decision, the Colorado Supreme Court said it was staying the decision until Jan. 4 and would keep that stay in place if an appeal is filed to the U.S. Supreme Court. That means Trump’s name could be placed on the ballot while the case is ongoing. Colorado is one of more than a dozen states scheduled to hold primaries on March 5, also known as Super Tuesday.
Derek Muller, a University of Notre Dame law professor who has studied the cases challenging Trump’s candidacy, called the Colorado decision unlike any other in history.
“No candidate’s ever been kept off the ballot for engaging in an insurrection, much less a presidential candidate, much less a former president,” he said. “So it’s just extraordinary.”
The decision puts intense pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to act. A broad ruling by the high court would resolve the issue for all states.
In the short term, the Colorado ruling could influence courts and election officials in other states, he said. Other states have not taken such a step so far but may be willing to do so now that Colorado has acted, he said.
Section 3 of the [14th] amendment barred people from office if they swore an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection. The measure was meant to keep former Confederates from returning to power.
Six Republican and independent voters from Colorado invoked the provision in a lawsuit this fall meant to keep Trump off the ballot.
“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the majority wrote. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”
Section 3 bars those who engage in insurrection from holding office and does not mention who can run for office. The majority rejected the idea that that meant the state could not keep candidates off the ballot who did not meet qualifications for serving as president, such as being at least 35 years old and being a U.S. citizen.
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Don't Believe Republican Fear Mongering on Crime
To listen to Republicans, not the least Donald Trump, one would believe that America finds itself with surging crime rates and that large cities in blue states are dangerous and crime ridden. They propose draconian policies that all too often target black and brown citizens and play to the hatreds of the Republican Party base of evangelicals and white supremacists who are best defined by who they hate. Meanwhile, actual crime data shows that crime rates are falling, crimes involving guns are highest in red states with little or no sensible gun control laws, and that almost all mass shootings are perpetrated by white males, many of whom have been influenced by right wing propaganda and websites. Why the disconnect from reality? Perhaps two reasons: (i) spreading lies about crime frightens voters to back Republican candidates who promise to be "tough on crime" even as their opposition to gun control makes all of us less safe, and (ii) good news on crime garners less media attention that stories about rape, murder and car jackings with much of the mainstream media which has the attention span of a fruit fly. even as the right wing "news" outlets focus on stories to frighten their viewers. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the real data and underscores the dishonesty of Republican doomsayers. Here are excerpts:
Rents, average monthly temperatures, grocery prices—most things in American life seem to be rising these days.
But not everything. In 2023, murder rates in the United States dropped at an astonishing rate, probably among the highest on record. That’s according to data gathered by Jeff Asher, an independent criminologist, from cities with publicly available numbers. In the sample of 175 cities, murder is down by an average of almost 13 percent this year.
And it’s not just murder. FBI data for the third quarter show that every category of crime except for motor-vehicle theft is down, some of them sharply, year over year from 2022. (As for the car thefts, they seem—in one of the weirdest data flukes you’ll ever see—to have been driven almost entirely by TikTok videos showing the ease of breaking into certain Kias and Hyundais.) Two years ago, as worries about soaring crime resounded, I wrote that America was in the midst of a violence wave, not a crime wave, as property crime continued to sink even while violent crime rose. Now America seems to be experiencing a peace wave.
“The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years,” Asher wrote in his Substack newsletter.
The drop is unlikely to get the same attention that the increase did. Last month, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who believe that crime in the United States is a very or extremely serious problem has risen sharply, from 54 to 63 percent, since fall 2021, when I noted the violence wave—even as most types of crime have declined over the same period.
The old adage is that if it bleeds, it leads: Lurid stories attract press coverage. More positive stories, such as the absence of crimes, are less likely to receive attention. This is bad news, so to speak, because mistaken impressions about how much crime is going on can lead policy makers and the public to embrace hasty or poorly considered policies, some of them with serious negative side effects. . . . reaction, rather than overreaction, should be the goal. Calibrating that is harder with inaccurate impressions.
“Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized,” Mark Warr, a sociologist who has studied the perception of crime, told me in 2021. “So crime nationally often looks much worse than it is.”
Dropping crime rates, and the perception (or misperception) of them, could be a factor in next year’s election. During the 2020 election, debates about policing were at the forefront, following the murder of George Floyd. . . . Donald Trump sought to emphasize “law and order”—or, rather, his vision of it—and instill fear in voters. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, some polling indicated that crime fears would badly damage Democratic candidates, though in the end Republicans severely underperformed.
Assuming he is the Republican presidential nominee, Trump is likely to once again run fear-based appeals on crime in 2024 . . . . If crime is not rising, the lack of headlines about rising crime could help Biden, but scanty coverage of falling crime could also limit the president’s gains. One quirk of the data is that Washington, D.C., where much of the press and the political establishment are based, is one of the few cities that has seen murder rise this year.
The drop in 2023 comes atop a 6 percent drop in 2022, according to statistics released by the FBI in October. . . . . Some voices, especially on the left, have hastened to note that even during the worst of the recent bad years, rates still sat below their peaks, in the 1980s. But for the majority of Americans born after 1981, who had seen falling national crime rates and historic lows for most of their lives, this was a jarring reversal.
[T]he specific reasons for the drop are also unclear. Part of it is that the conditions that seem to have led to the rise—including the Floyd protests and the pandemic—have eased. But actions taken by policy makers to quell crime may have also helped.
“There is no single trend that explains why violence might rise or fall in different places—for instance, Philadelphia has seen a sharp drop in violence this year, but a couple hours away is Washington D.C., one of the few cities where violence has risen,”
The exact details of the drop in crime won’t be known for months. The FBI releases its annual report on crime in the fall of the following year. Statistics collated by Asher, by Sharkey’s AmericanViolence.org, and by other groups are the best available and have to stand in for official figures. . . . That said, even without official FBI numbers, the 2023 drop is distinct enough to trust—and celebrate.
Monday, December 18, 2023
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