How a compromised Supreme Court will save Donald Trump.
The current Supreme Court is – at best – the most shamelessly conservative ever or – at worst – a political arm of the Republican Party’s agenda. The striking down of several tenets of the 1964 Voting Act and its siding with corporations over citizens and, of course, its most egregious crimes, the stripping of women’s reproductive rights, has come to a head. Thanks to the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to strike the domestic terrorist, Donald Trump from its ballot come 2024, the Court must weigh in. There are several reasons why they should overturn this decision, not the least of which Trump having yet to be convicted of anything despite a mountain of glaring evidence, but many more on why they could uphold it: Specifically, the principles of states’ rights and local election laws that conservatives of every bent have flown up several flagpoles for a century or more; or the Court can simply throw their master a lifeline and once again act as the legal arm of the Grand Old Party.
Juicy stuff.
Let’s unpack by starting with Originalism, shall we?
For decades now, conservative judges (most infamously led by late right-wing lion Justice Anthony Scalia) have held an unflinching belief in the primacy of Originalism, a stringent method of constitutional and statutory interpretation that asserts all legal text should be construed based on the original understanding at the time of adoption. And so, if this is to be understood as sacrosanct, then the Colorado Court’s interpretation of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted as one of the Reconstruction Amendments in the summer of 1868, is airtight. Any attempt by an individual or individuals to disrupt or topple the democratic construct of the nation must be disqualified from running for or holding office. This is the very definition of Trump’s attempted coup d’état. From using the nation’s most powerful pulpit to spread blatant lies and unsubstantiated claims about a fixed election – dozens of which had already been defeated in recounts and court cases – to the fake elector schemes that have him currently in legal jeopardy in Georgia and D.C., and culminating with that mess he started by inviting an angered mob to the Capitol to stop the ratifying of a fair and legal election on January 6, 2021.
Conservatives should cum when they read the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s in that pocket Constitution they always wave at the Woke. Rightfully considered one of the most consequential amendments adopted after the bloody massacre known as the Civil War, it addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law for formerly enslaved Americans. It also provides protection against what they constantly harp on as the “evils of federal government.” Mostly, it should be a favorite for nothing else but forming the basis for the landmark Supreme Court decision declaring George W. Bush president in 2000. But, as all laws, the Fourteenth Amendment swings both ways, as unpopular anticonservative rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Thus, the reasoning behind the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, which this hack Court conveniently wiped out to placate religious loons and fascists.
It’s a malleable amendment that you can choose to suit your needs, thus making it certain that his Court gets Trump back on the Colorado ballot tout suite, and at the time of this writing, the Maine ballot, as their courts have disqualified Trump’s 2024 presidential bid there.
To say this is whole thing is rare is an understatement. Section 3 of the Amendment was previously only used once: to block Socialist Party of America member Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin from assuming his seat in the House of Representatives in 1919 and 1920. Berger was convicted of a crime (violating the Espionage Act for opposing U.S. entry into World War I), but, let’s face it, that’s a fart in the wind when put up against the former president’s crime spree for those crucial months after we was waxed in the 2020 election.
Then we have States’ Rights – the political porn of conservative “values.” It is States’ Rights that was used to prop up slavery – something apparently former South Carolina (yeah, the state that started the Civil War), Governor Nikki Haley is unfamiliar with. It was also the hammer used in attempts to stop the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills in 1964 and ’65, and it was States’ Rights that currently enslaves women with the Dobbs decision in 2022.
During a debate on gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act, which this Court has done flippantly, Republicans like Senator John Thune of South Dakota, cried, “Make no mistake about it, that is what we are talking about: federalizing elections in this country; usurping, preempting states, where elections have been administered and regulated since the inception of this country.” The aptly named Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho chimed in with “This was a power grab that circumvented and federalized our entire elections process, stripping states of their constitutional authorities.”
Yeah, so if Colorado doesn’t want an insurrectionist on their ballot, then how liberal is it to have the federal government force it to do so?
Hmmm… I’ll give you a minute.
Now, remember, the only reason this Court exists as it does is Republicans refused to honor a vote on Barrack Obama’s SCOTUS nominee with 10 months to go before an election because of that election’s import in 2016. Then, when faced with a more pressing nominee from Trump in late 2020, only weeks before the election, they rammed an anti-abortion candidate through the Senate. Now, the very same Court will ignore States’ Rights and Colorado’s state-run laws of governing their election aid a criminal in running there.
Hypocrisy is baked in.
Now, I have been writing here for years that true conservatism is dead. It was already a flimsy reed of an ideology before Trump turned the Republican Party into a nationalistic populist sinkhole, but if this fixed Court rules against Colorado, which I expect it to do, then it is truly and finally finished.
