It's Okay. It is Only Insurrection.
I listened to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Trump v. Anderson, on Thursday, February 8th. The Justices heard the two sides of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ballot decision. I do not have a law degree. I am, however, a college graduate, but that wasn’t sufficient to understand the arguments from the lawyer seeking to overturn the Colorado ballot decision. His argument was obtuse and to me, this indicates that the argument was weak and required a lot of scaffolding to hold itself up.
I also listened to Glen Kirchner’s YouTube video analysis. His opinion is that the Supreme Court was more interested in staying in the weeds of semantics and hypotheticals, not about protecting democracy. It seemed quite clear that they realized that they would have to be very careful to make an argument that would let them off the hook should they decide that it would not be constitutional to keep the former president off the ballot in Colorado. They asked the question of the attorneys ‘what if other States chose to throw candidates off their ballots based on individual State rules?’ Chief Justice Roberts said chaos would consume the election process. However, elections in this country are operated according to the policies and operations established by each state. There is no Federal interference. This is not a new revelation. What has made this divisive is that an insurrectionist is running for the office of president. Glenn Kirchner points out that the Supreme Court had recently visited similar territory last year when they decided to turn the issue of the reproductive rights of women back to the States. All kinds of chaos have ensued. Where was there concern then?
I don’t agree with that chaos theory at all. There is no precedent to support this hypothetical. We don’t know that States would engage in a game of ballot-football, kicking off presidential candidates based on their individual laws and policies (and politics). The States would have to prove the relevancy of their rulings and would not be able to make such decisions willy-nilly. Chief Justice Roberts was speaking as if this scenario would be a high probability if an insurrectionist candidate was kept off the ballot in the State of Colorado.
What about the events of January 6th? You don’t have to guess at what would happen if the former president of the U.S. assembled an armed mob and had them march to the Capitol with the intent to interrupt the ceremonial counting of electoral votes for the President of the United States. You don’t have to guess that the armed mob would become violent and destructive, creating an insurrection. This isn’t a hypothetical, but it is not part of the Justices’ decision making.
None of the Justices seemed to question the fact that the former president had planned and participated in an insurrection as the Colorado courts had found or that the plans for disrupting the peaceful transfer of power had been in development well before the day of the insurrection. The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment is explicit:
“No person shall…hold any office…under the United States…who, having previously taken an oath…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.”
This statement appears clear and transparent. The Colorado Supreme Court found the statement clear and transparent. Only the insurrectionist and his followers question the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to exclude him from the ballot. He participated in a plot to steal the votes from the 80 million Americans who voted for Biden. The Justices on the Court seem more concerned with the 33 million or so potential voters for an insurrectionist.
It appeared to me as though the Justices in their questioning wanted the attorneys on either side to ease them out of an unpopular decision. I thought the reason the case was before the highest court in the country was to allow them to make a decision that would be constitutional and not unleash chaos or infringe upon state’s rights or the rights of the voters for Biden in 2020.
I thought that after four years of the previous presidency that there would be more of an appetite to protect democracy. Despite the threat to democracy and the public’s disillusionment over another Biden v. Trump campaign, we still don’t seem ready for something new. We still cling to legacy 20th century institutions and ways of thinking that require expansion because they are no longer serving us. We are getting there. The events pushing us are fast, but our progress is slow.