Trump to Supreme Court: Insurrectionists Can Be President

[bnew]

Supreme Court Skeptical About Kicking Trump Off Ballot

The nation’s highest court is weighing whether Colorado and other states can pull Trump from the 2024 ballot under the 14th Amendment.

www.thedailybeast.com

Trump to Supreme Court: Insurrectionists Can Be President​

NOT THE PROBLEM

The nation’s highest court is weighing whether Colorado and other states can pull Trump from the 2024 ballot under the 14th Amendment.

Jose Pagliery​

Political Investigations Reporter

Updated Feb. 08, 2024 11:48AM EST / Published Feb. 08, 2024 10:54AM EST

Andrew Chung/Reuters​

State officials cannot prohibit Donald Trump—or anyone else—from running for the White House “even if the candidate is an admitted insurrectionist,” the former president’s lawyers told the Supreme Court on Thursday.

The nation’s highest court is now considering whether Colorado and several other states can yank Trump from the 2024 ballot, employing the 14th Amendment to deem his plot to remain in office after losing the 2020 election as an “insurrection” as defined by the Constitution.

The central issue in this historic case is that Trump has not been charged—or even convicted—of insurrection, even though several federal judges, the Justice Department, and congressional investigators have essentially deemed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress as a violent rebellion that threatened the nation’s democracy.

Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, warned that allowing state officials to unilaterally knock the former president from the ballot would “take away the votes of potentially tens of millions of Americans.” He argued that having states utilize the 14th Amendment as a tool this way “would be adding to and altering” the constitution’s qualifications for the presidency.

The law in question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted after the Civil War as a measure that would bar from office those pro-Confederate insurrectionists who had taken an oath to support the Constitution.

The case forces the Supreme Court to closely examine that provision, which says, “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Importantly, the Constitution makes no mention of conviction. But justices know that allowing a state to take such a dramatic step could be perceived as unfair by some in the American public—even those outside Trump’s MAGA movement.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explored why the provision doesn’t explicitly mention the president as being covered by this rule, noting that it starts by listing senators, congressional representatives, and electors—only to later include officers of the United States. She questioned whether it was plausible that “the framers would have smuggled it in with that catch-all phrase.”

Several other justices questioned the use of the term “officer,” showing how some of this case might hinge on whether or not a president can be deemed a federal officer, even if that would mean, paradoxically, that the Constitution keeps all insurrections out of office—except the commander in chief.

Mitchell drew from another part of the Constitution, Article II, Section 3, noting that, “The president shall commission all of the officers of the United States. The president doesn’t commission himself and he cannot commission himself.”

“If ‘officer of the United States' means appointed officials, there’s just no way he’s covered by Section 3,” he said.

The opposing lawyer, who represents the effort to keep Trump off the ballot in Colorado, dismissed this line of reasoning as too focused on language as opposed to the bigger picture.

Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a campaign rally.

Reuters​

“This case does not come down to mere prepositions,” said Jason Murray, who represents the Colorado woman who set this effort into motion.

Norma Anderson, a 91-year-old former Republican legislator from Colorado who has rejected MAGA politics, is the plaintiff in the case.

“States are allowed to safeguard their ballots by excluding those who are… as here, those who have engaged in insurrection against the constitution in violation of their oath,” Murray told the justices.

Justice Clarence Thomas prodded Murray to provide “contemporaneous examples” that would show that states disqualified national candidates shortly after the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868. Murray pointed to the way Georgia’s governor disqualified a congressman that same year, but he also argued that state officials back then couldn’t yank someone from the ballot the way states want to do with Trump now because the voting system was different.

“Not surprising there are few examples, because they didn't have ballots. They were party ballots or write-in. There wouldn't be a process to determine before an election if a candidate was qualified,” Murray said.

It took nearly an hour for the court to address the heart of the matter: whether Trump’s role in whipping up the crowd of his raging supporters in Washington, D.C. three years ago counted as inciting an insurrection—or if the violent attack could be deemed as such.

“We never accepted that this was an insurrection… President Trump did not engage in any act that can be plausibly categorized in insurrection,” Mitchell told the court, claiming that the term “insurrection” is narrowly defined.

“There needs to be an organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government of the United States through violence,” he said.

“A chaotic effort to overthrow the government is not an insurrection?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson shot back.

That prompted Mitchell to acknowledge that “the events were shameful, criminal, violent.”

The decision is already tainted by the fact that Justice Clarence Thomas decided to remain on the panel hearing the arguments—despite the fact that his own wife played a central role in the very insurrection in question. Emails obtained by the House Jan. 6 Committee that initially investigated what led up to the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol showed that conservative activist Ginni Thomas had coordinated with John Eastman, a Trump lawyer who came up with the plan to interrupt the certification of the 2020 election. And she had even emailed Arizona state lawmakers, pushing them to engage in Trump’s plan to replace legitimate electors with MAGA loyal pawns who sought to flip the election results.

On Wednesday, a day before the Supreme Court would hear the case, Sen. dikk Durbin (D-IL) tweeted, “I’m calling for Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself in the 14th Amendment case determining if Donald Trump is ineligible for the 2024 ballot.”

On Thursday, the progressive group Stand Up America stressed that Thomas’ decision to remain on the panel posed a serious threat to a fair outcome.

“Justice Thomas should recuse himself from this monumental case. Ginni Thomas’ involvement in the seditious conspiracy that led to the January 6 insurrection is a bald-faced conflict of interest. If Thomas refuses, it will not only be a blatant denial of impartial review but also a rejection of Chief Justice Roberts’ recently issued Code of Conduct,” it said in a statement.

And yet Justice Thomas, who rarely speaks up, was the first to make a question, asking what role the states would play.

 

[bnew]

The Supreme Court Wants No Part of Disqualifying Trump From the Ballot

The justices spent Thursday’s oral arguments looking for an off-ramp from kicking the former president out of the presidential race.

newrepublic.com

Matt Ford/

February 8, 2024

SCAREDY CATS

The Supreme Court Wants No Part of Disqualifying Trump From the Ballot​

The justices spent Thursday’s oral arguments looking for an off-ramp from kicking the former president out of the presidential race.​

NATHAN HOWARD/GETTY IMAGES

Jason Murray, lead attorney representing Colorado, speaks with members of the media outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

The Supreme Court doesn’t seem to want to disqualify former President Donald Trump from political office for his role in the January 6 insurrection. The only question left for them is how to write a ruling that overturns the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to the contrary.

In more than two hours of oral arguments on Thursday, almost all of the justices rejected the idea that the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could be used to bar Trump from running for president this November—or for any other future political office, for that matter. Even some of the court’s liberal justices seemed skeptical about the idea of applying the clause to Trump.

“I think the question you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States,” Justice Elena Kagan told Jason Murray, who argued on behalf of a group of voters who had sued the Colorado secretary of state to remove Trump from the ballot. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also pointedly asked whether Trump, as a former president, even fell under the clause’s language.

The case, Trump v. Anderson, revolves around a few different legal disputes. The clause applies to virtually anyone who previously took an oath to support the Constitution by holding public office. If they subsequently took part in “insurrection or rebellion,” they are barred from serving in Congress, as a member of the Electoral College, or from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” Congress can remove individual disqualifications by a two-thirds vote of each chamber.

A group of voters sued to keep Trump off the ballot last year, arguing that his role in January 6 amounted to participation in an insurrection. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed in December in a 4–3 decision. The U.S. Supreme Court swiftly agreed to hear the case on an accelerated schedule.

At least a few of the justices appeared to be worried that states would use bogus claims to disqualify otherwise legitimate candidates. These fears are not wholly unfounded. As I noted earlier this week, a coalition of Republican governors and attorneys general suggested, in Goodfellas fashion, that such an event just might occur if Trump were to lose his suit to remain on the Colorado ballot. Some of the court’s conservative members amplified those threats during oral arguments.

“We have been told that if what Colorado did here is sustained, other states are going to retaliate and they are going to potentially exclude another candidate from the ballot,” Justice Samuel Alito said, in apparent reference to Biden. When Murray later argued that the courts would likely have to decide those cases as well and deem them frivolous, Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back.

“You might think they’re frivolous, but the people who are bringing them may not think they’re frivolous,” he told Murray. “Insurrection is a broad, broad term. And if there’s some debate about it, I suppose that will go into the decision and then eventually, what, we would be deciding whether it was an insurrection when one president did something as opposed to when somebody else did something else? And what do we do? Do we wait until near the time of counting the ballots and sort of go through which states are valid and which states aren’t?”

Some members of the court, including Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then appeared to coalesce around the idea that states can’t use the disqualification clause against federal officeholders. Alito, later echoed by Kavanaugh, noted that there wasn’t much of a historical record of states using the clause to disqualify federal officeholders. They reasoned that the absence of historical action could mean that it was precluded by historical practice.

This would be a convenient way to dispose of this particular case, but it will lead to other problems down the line. For one thing, it would invite other actors in the constitutional system to take action after the presidential election is over. If Trump wins in November and Democrats also hold both chambers of Congress, for example, they could theoretically decline to count Trump’s electoral votes because of his insurrectionist disqualification on January 6, 2025.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dinged Trump attorney Jonathan Mitchell for making an argument that essentially only applied to his client. Since Trump never held prior elected office, he would be the only president in at least two hundred years who wouldn’t fall under the clause’s terms. “But just so we’re clear, under that reading, only [Trump] is disqualified because virtually every other president except Washington has taken an oath to support the Constitution, correct?”

“That’s right,” Mitchell replied. He noted that it was an open question whether John Adams would count since he took an oath as vice president, but others hypothetically would. “Yes, President Biden would certainly be covered,” he added. “He took the oath as a member of Congress. And that’s true of every previous president.”

But Mitchell’s overall arguments did not appear to persuade any of the justices, who instead tried to find their own off-ramp to dispose of this case. At one point, Mitchell conceded that his distinction of “office” versus “officer of the United States” didn’t make much sense for early American leaders to adopt. “Is that rule a sensible one?” Kagan asked, referring to the Constitution’s original Framers. “You know, if they had thought about it, what reason would they have given for that rule?”

“I don’t think there is a good rationale given that this was compromise legislation,” he said, referring to the Constitution. “And sometimes this happens with statutory compromises and even constitutional compromises.” Indeed, other legal scholars have pointed out that excluding the president from the “officer” category leads to all sorts of other problems, not least of which is that it would exempt him from the rule against holding positions in other branches of government.

Jackson, however, appeared to agree with that framework as a potential solution for the case. She tried to suggest that the amendment’s drafters intentionally omitted the presidency because their Reconstruction-era concerns were focused on other problems. “The pressing concern, at least as I see the historical record,” she explained, “was actually what was going on at lower levels of the government, the possible infiltration and embedding of insurrectionists into the state government apparatus and the real risk that former Confederates might return to power in the South via state-level elections either in local offices or as representatives of the states in Congress. And that’s a very different lens.”

But that would lead to an arguably even more absurd reading: that the amendment’s drafters thought ex-Confederates should be excluded from every public office in the republic except the one that commands the nation’s armed forces. If they sought to exclude anti-constitutional figures from public life, why would they leave an exception for the office where they could do the most damage?

I often note that oral arguments can be an imperfect window into the court’s thinking; the justices, given time to ruminate, often reach conclusions in their final decision that weren’t hinted at during their public deliberations. This does not seem to be one of those cases. Almost all of the justices seem fundamentally opposed to the idea that they should allow Colorado to disqualify Trump from the ballot. (Sotomayor was the only one who didn’t signal as much.) How exactly they get from that sensation to a workable ruling remains to be seen. But it would be stunning after Thursday’s arguments if the case went any other way.

Getting to what seems to be their preferred legal destination won’t be an easy endeavor. The justices will have to get around the plain text and intent of the disqualification clause, as well as the obviousness of what happened on January 6, 2021. “The Framers of Section 3 knew from painful experience that those who had violently broken their oaths to the Constitution couldn’t be trusted to hold power again because they could dismantle our constitutional democracy from within, and so they created a democratic safety valve,” Murray argued. “President Trump can go ask Congress to give him amnesty by a two-thirds vote. But, unless he does that, our Constitution protects us from insurrectionists.”

Some of the justices appeared uneasy with rendering a decision that would deprive millions of Americans of their preferred candidate. Murray, for his part, noted that Trump himself tried to do exactly that four years ago, except through illegal means instead of constitutional mechanisms. “The reason we’re here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him,” he told the justices. “And the Constitution doesn’t require that he be given another chance.” Since the court heard the case on an accelerated schedule, a decision could come within the next few weeks.

 

[Dr. Acula]

Fourteen amendment says otherwise.

The feds didn't want confederates who swore alligence to the US before the war and then turned around and waged war against it to be able to hold office again and sabatoge the very government they hated. They violated their oath once, why would you let them back in office?

The day this man is dead will be a day of celebration. Ultimate POS.

 

[bnew]

“I don’t think there is a good rationale given that this was compromise legislation,” he said, referring to the Constitution. “And sometimes this happens with statutory compromises and even constitutional compromises.” Indeed, other legal scholars have pointed out that excluding the president from the “officer” category leads to all sorts of other problems, not least of which is that it would exempt him from the rule against holding positions in other branches of government.


it's just a downward spiral of chaos if they exclude a president from the officer category.

 

[Adeptus Astartes]

Just like Russiagate, the narrative has shifted.
"The Adminiatration did not collude with Russia" became, "Collusion is not illegal"

Now it's gone from, "The President did not lead an insurrection" to, "Insurrectionists are allowed to be President."

 

[acri1]

Unfortunately this is a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court with a third of them being put in directly by Trump.

No matter how terrible Trump's argument is they'll probably find some way to juelz the ruling in his favor.

 

[voiture]

This right wing court is rogue. At least 5 of them are MAGA

 

[Adeptus Astartes]

Unfortunately this is a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court with a third of them being put in directly by Trump.

No matter how terrible Trump's argument is they'll probably find some way to juelz the ruling in his favor.

I bet it comes down to either "he wasn't convicted, nor did he pledge alliegance to a foreign power like the Confederates did, therefore the law doesn't apply" or, "the Constitution doesn't specifically say 'President', so amend the amendment to bar Presidents specifically"

 

[Dameon Farrow]

This right wing court is rogue. At least 5 of them are MAGA

Katanji Brown was one of the first ones to start with the justifications, though.

Looks like they don't want that kind of precedent on their heads. Went the way I expected.

 

[Fillerguy]

“I don’t think there is a good rationale given that this was compromise legislation,” he said, referring to the Constitution. “And sometimes this happens with statutory compromises and even constitutional compromises.” Indeed, other legal scholars have pointed out that excluding the president from the “officer” category leads to all sorts of other problems, not least of which is that it would exempt him from the rule against holding positions in other branches of government.


it's just a downward spiral of chaos if they exclude a president from the officer category.

That's probably why they don't want to touch this. There would be a meltdown in several branches of government if we had to define what an officer is.

Trump is willing to destroy the legitimacy of the Office to avoid prison time, for destroying the legitimacy of the Office. Its a lowkey genius move by the carrot's team

 

[acri1]

I bet it comes down to either "he wasn't convicted, nor did he pledge alliegance to a foreign power like the Confederates did, therefore the law doesn't apply" or, "the Constitution doesn't specifically say 'President', so amend the amendment to bar Presidents specifically"

I agree. They'll probably say it only applies if you've been convicted

 

[Hater Eraser]

I agree. They'll probably say it only applies if you've been convicted

" shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Didnt he aid the ppl that were convicted tho' ?

 

[Neuromancer]

What is the crime for treason?

 

[OneDeep]

What is the crime for treason?

Death

Under U.S. Code Title 18, the penalty is death, or not less than five years' imprisonment (with a minimum fine of $10,000, if not sentenced to death). Any person convicted of treason against the United States also forfeits the right to hold public office in the United States.

 

[MrLogic]

Whats to point of there fake patriotism if they over rule this.


it's time to call thIS maga shyt what it is WHITE SUPREMACY



in the mainstream