politics

While listening to the hearing this morning, I was taken by the overall consensus and impartiality of ALL the justices (though Barrett does sound like a child who's in way over her head). I was surprised most by Jackson's line of questioning which seemed more opposed to the ballot removal than anyone else.

This isn't about conservatives - conservatives are the one's suing to keep him off the ballot. It's about the Constitution and state rights.

If you're interested in the actual legality of it all, rather than the "politics", I would encourage you to keep away from biased media opinions, click/rage-bait headlines, and (it should go without saying) social media. It's actually an extremely interesting case and this article you are commenting on without reading is a great place to start.

Conservative and liberal justices alike questioned during arguments Thursday whether Trump can be disqualified from being president again

A lot of it appeared super obvious to me over the past few months but the justices and lawyers are bringing up some interesting perspectives I would never have thought of.

Their main concern was whether Congress must act before states can invoke a constitutional provision that was adopted after the Civil War to prevent former officeholders who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again.

Justice Elena Kagan was among several justices who wanted to know “why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.”

Chief Justice John Roberts worried that a ruling against Trump would prompt efforts to disqualify other candidates, “and surely some of those will succeed.”

You and I and the internet can argue all we want about whether he should be permitted on every sate ballot (I presume we're in agreement of the preferred outcome) but, I'll assume, neither of us are lawyers, state counsels, or constitutional scholars. And it seems that there's a discussion about 'being on a ballot' and 'being inaugurated as president' are the same or not. Perhaps he's on the ballot and wins the election only to find the electors can't vote for him. Yeah - it's weird AF.

Let's burn this mother down, pookie!

It's also not only too conservative, it's too religious.

Not only is what you're saying obviously correct, but THE PEOPLE WHO VOTED IN THE FUCKING AMENDMENT was asked about this exact lack of the word "president", and pointed to the officer line, and said that clearly included the president.

It's also worth noting that there was just a single reference in the Senate debate to the fact that the president and vice president were not explicitly mentioned in Howard's draft as "officer(s) of the United States," the way members of Congress and state officials had been itemized in the text. Would the disqualification clause of the amendment not cover the top posts in the executive branch?

"Why did you omit to exclude them?" asked Maryland Democratic Sen. Reverdy Johnson.

Maine's Lot Morrill jumped in to clarify.

"Let me call the Senator's attention to the words 'or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States,'" Morrill said, ending the discussion on that point.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/framers-14th-amendments-disqualification-clause-analysis/story?id=105996364

It sounds to me like they are going to weasel out of it by saying the Colorado Supreme Court doesn't have the authority to make that decision for everyone.

Which they didn't.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump is disqualified and cannot appear on the Colorado ballots. The Colorado Supreme Court does have that authority, because the Colorado state legislature gave it to them and nothing in federal law says they don't. Colorado had previously disqualified another candidate, and the judge who determined they could was Neil Gorsuch.

There is no question as to whether the President is an officer of the United States. There is no question as to whether his oath to uphold and defend the constitution is also an oath to support the constitution. There is no question as to whether the actions on January 6th were an insurrection, as several participants have already been convicted of seditious conspiracy. There is no question as to whether Trump supported them, because he live tweeted his support to the world in real time. There is no question as to whether Trump needs to be convicted, because the amendment never mentions conviction, and none of the other people previously disqualified under this amendment from office were convicted of anything.

None of these arguments holds even the faintest hint of water. They are bad faith arguments made by political hacks with a predetermined agenda to support Trump. The court is illegitimate, and we have no functional justice system.

Anything resembling a more left leaning insurrection will get a very different response than the last one. You will be murdered by the state on the spot. The feds bombed a civilian neighborhood in the 80s for less than that.

Questions of Legality aren't being heard here. This is only about eligibility for being on a presidential ballot and the ability of an individual state to determine eligibility and remove the candidate from the ballot.

No. The questions posed by the Supreme Court centered around whether there was merit in allowing any single state, which may have arbitrary criteria and or processes, to effectively eliminate a candidate from the ballot, and if so, under what constraints. Ours a valid question. Where is the line? If you allow this precedent, how might it be abused by others?

I agree with everything here other than "This".

This case has been brought to the Supreme Court by of the Colorado republicans who wanted Trump off the ballot.

If you had read the first sentence of the article, you'd see that most of the judges are in agreement.

with conservative and liberal justices in apparent agreement in a case that puts them at the heart of a presidential election.

No, no, don't worry, the Supreme Court ruling that the plain language of the Constitution must be interpreted in ever-narrower ways (except when it helps the right-wing) is totally not troubling at all.

No way man, this is the middle of the end. The beginning of the end was when they introduced legal bribery after dumbing down the general populace for a couple decades.

Bye bye all amendments.

That's what Republicans in Texas are doing on the border.

SCOTUS rules it can choose the next president.

SCOTUS rules it can execute people without a trial.

Except it's been proven by the courts already.

The legal case in Colorado already determined he met the definitions of insurrection as known by the authors of the 14th.

Based on a summary of their questions and statements, I suspect SCOTUS will rule that only via a procedure defined by Congress can someone be determined to be ineligible for the Presidency based on the 14th. And only at the federal level.

There was such a procedure defined by law following the Civil War but it was revoked by Congress in the 1940s.

I mean, yeah it’s disappointing but hopefully a legal case can prove he in incited an insurrection and then states can remove him from the ballot.

"Trial was too close to an election. Political. Overruled."

I'm all for democracy in the US, but the electoral college was put in specifically to avoid being a democracy. Also representative democracy is just a fancy word for oligarchy. Plus legislation hasn't represented public opinion since the at least the 80s, based on research from Princeton.

So we've never been designed as democracy, they are checks against democracy, and we're not functionally democratic.

What christians and fascists are destroying at the moment is the rule of law.