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Pinning this one up since this will be the big news today.
More info here:
@[email protected] has already shared the link for when the streaming begins on Feb 8 @ 10am ET
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/live.aspx
In case that link gets the Internet hug of death (and it may!) other news organizations will carry the stream live. MSNBC for one has already pledged to have it.
Let's keep it all contained in this thread instead of having 8 or 10 separate posts on it.
Trump only needs to be removed from the ballot of so few states and hopefully some of those states where it's barred from writing in an ineligible candidate.
Once he loses any state, few or more, he's automatically lost. Also, Colorado is like 10 votes to the electoral college, which is a decent chunk of the votes.
Someone help me out with some legal definitions here. If I am not mistaken this lawsuite is about Trump's eligibility to be on the Primary ballot. Not the actual election ballot. What is to stop the supreme Court from saying the constitutional requirements do not apply to the primary ballots because those ballots don't elect a president. The RNC could nominate a golden retriever as their nominee in the primary if they want, it just wouldnt be eligible in the general election.
We are just going to have to go through this all again ahead of the general election arent we.
The Colorado supreme court said that Trump is not eligible to be president, which means he can't be on the general ballot either.
The SCOTUS agreed to hear an appeal. That means they will have to decide whether the Colorado ruling was correct or incorrect. Either way, they will determine whether Trump will appear on the general ballot in Colorado.
Ok first of all, a golden retriever would never support the GOP. A shit covered sewer rat however, fits the bill perfectly.
This case, before a packed court and we should expect…?
Yeah, this is why Conservatives love Trump so much. He stacked the court for decades to come in their favor. Majority or no majority. They have the power to overturn every law or regulation they might not like.
They are probably going to rule in Trump's favor, but I'll be curious to see their reasoning. There are reasons beyond the current situation that it might be bad to remove him from the ballot - for example observe the threats in other states to remove Biden from the ballot. While that is clearly retaliatory bullshit, how do we prevent, for example, Texas deciding that whatever Biden is doing or not doing on the border amounts to insurrection and so he's off the ballot? And Biden could sue to get on the ballot, but that could be costly and if there isn't a stay by the court it could take until after the election to prove he should've been on it. Without a way to forestall this, we run the risk of a victory over Trump today creating havoc in the future.
That being said, the court is packed with originalists, and if we just go by the letter of the law and precedent and figure it is for the legislative branch to fix the problems, then it's really hard to argue that a state is compelled to allow a candidate on the ballot that they deem has committed insurrection. Every hole you might poke in it has already been answered definitively. Is the law meant to apply to the President? Absolutely 100% as you can see from the record of congressional debate over it. Must the person be found guilty of a specific crime? No, that has never been the case and it was so applied at the time. Gorsuch himself ruled that a state may exclude from the ballot a candidate who is ineligible to serve.
Every single question of law seems to have been answered definitively. Plus, Trump is an albatross. He is destroying the Republican party from within and the adults in the room know it but are powerless (gutless, I think) to stop him. Behind the scenes they might well be praying to the Supreme Court to offer them a solution.
I believe it could go either way, but I'm going to assume they will restore Trump to the ballot because of politics and perhaps looking at the future it is the least-disruptive change. As much a I hate Trump and would love to guarantee he cannot be President, I'm not sure the future is best served by keeping him off.
What happens if states collude to deny one (or any) candidate 270 electoral votes? Well, then each state gets a single vote which will (as things currently stand) go to the Republicans every single time. There are states so gerrymandered that they have Democrat-majority populations but Republican-controlled legislatures, so this doesn't seem to me to be an unrealistic possibility. This would obviously be terrible if the Supreme Court rules against Trump without also somehow preventing this sort of thing.
Caveat: I'm not a lawyer or expert on any of this. My concerns about possible results of keeping him off the ballot might be completely unfounded.
I am not a lawyer.
He's absolutely responsible for the jan 6 2021 insurrection. But he's not actually legally guilty of it yet, no?
I suspect that they might rule that only someone convicted of insurrection can be removed from the ballot; regardless of the actual letter of the law nor requiring that.
Keep in mind that the SCOTUS majority have spent decades advocating the doctrine of "originalism".
Originalists think that the 14th means whatever the Reconstructionists who wrote it thought it meant. And it's abundantly clear that Reconstructionists did not intend to prosecute former Confederates but still wanted to keep them out of office.
If the SCOTUS majority ignores what Reconstructionists thought in order to help Trump, it would be like the Pope ignoring Catholic doctrine in order to help Trump. They can do it, but they know their legal theory will never be taken seriously again. And that's a big deal, since Justices are ultimately remembered for their legal theories.
I can't argue with that. I said I expect them to rule in Trump's favor, but the specifics will be interesting. It's also not unimaginable that they would rule in Colorado's favor. There is a tremendous amount of law and precedent that states run their own elections (plus everything I said above about the specific section of the Constitution in question) and I feel like the Supreme Court could be loathe to intercede any more than necessity demands.
Whichever way the ruling goes, I think the answer will be less interesting than the reasoning behind it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The justices will consider whether Republican front-runner Donald Trump can be disqualified from a state primary ballot because he allegedly engaged in an insurrection to try to cling to power, after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
"Those who drafted section 3 of the 14th Amendment back in the 1860s were very clear that they understood this provision not just to cover former Confederates but that it would stand as a shield to protect our Constitution for all time going forward and so this is not some dusty relic," said Jason Murray, their lawyer.
"In an ideal world, it would have been great to have years to build cases in different states and different parts of the country regarding defendants at different levels," said Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is backing the lawsuit.
Murray said there's a reason to revive dormant language in the Constitution now, in this case: "No other American president has refused to peacefully hand over the reins of power after losing an election," he said.
The case puts the Supreme Court in the middle of the presidential election for the first time since it stopped the Florida recount and handed the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.
The Supreme Court hasn't offered a time table for its decision, but some legal experts think the justices could rule before the Super Tuesday primaries, in early March.
The original article contains 1,497 words, the summary contains 241 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!