When you get into the history of the Colorado case it's not as egregious as you're playing it out to be. It was understood at the time with plenty of cases that the 14th amendment was automatic. Thousands of people were barred from the ballot after the civil war without conviction implicitly, and at least four people that I've found were barred without conviction explicitly when they tried to run anyway.

This is an open question that hasn't been answered, but the Colorado supreme court is within the bounds of what has been done historically. The supreme court would be overwriting the history of the application of the 14th amendment if they overturn the Colorado supreme court. Which they, of course, have the right to do. It's just important to acknowledge that what they did is not out of historical bounds until that ruling comes down.

After the Civil War, it was not practical to try and convict every single person because, as you said, there were thousands of them. The Confederate States also had just lost the war, so they naturally got no say in how the country would proceed. Currently, we're not (yet?) in a state of civil war, red states still have a say in who runs the country. If anything, the idea that 7 Democratic nominees from a blue state court have the right to unilaterally stymie the presidential candidate of team red brings us a lot closer to a new civil war. And also note that the former confederate officials were guilty of insurrection beyond any shadow of a doubt, which is not true in Trump's case.

And last but not least, there were afaik no instances after the Civil War in which polticians with ambitions for national office were barred from running for office in some states, but explicitly allowed to run in others. Like I've argued repeatedly: Trump either has to be eligible to be on the ballot everywhere or nowhere, with no in-between. The answer to the question "is Trump guilty of insurrection" cannot possibly vary from state to state...

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 12 2024 03:07pm

I actually agree with the last part. The supreme court should rule he did give aid and comfort to an insurrection, if not attempted one himself since he tried to go there with the insurrectionist for the explicit purpose of stopping the certification.

But in lieu of that, a state supreme court doing this is not against the grain in really any sense.

After the civil war it was also not a matter of like, state governments all being barred. There were like, county sherifs being barred. Did a county sherrif participate in the insurrection? Hard to say. It was understood at the time to be an extremely low bar.


You've said a few times its weird that we aren't wanting to all settle this with a pure democracy where we vote against Trump, but I want to point out our system is not and was never intended to be a pure democracy. We have rules about who can run for office. It is entirely within their rights and duties for a court to rule somebody ineligable based on constitutional requirements like age, citizenship, and yes, if they did an insurrection. You do not have a constitutional right to run for any and all offices.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 12 2024 03:21pm

The constitution clearly still counts towards the rights of Americans abroad, its not like a court could just carry the accused across the border to Mexico and hold a trial where they get no due process and hang em before walking back into US territory.
Likewise, the constitution doesn't confer full protections to non-citizens even on US soil, just a limited set of rights which doesn't necessarily cover the same extent of 5th amendment protections- 'due process' being a different level of process for different courts. Criminals courts get one set of rules, immigration courts for illegal aliens get another, military courts for officers get another- and presidents being impeached get another. Even if Obama's example, the DoJ certainly didn't argue that the mere fact of Al Awlaki being overseas stripped him of his rights, they argued that him being beyond the reasonable ability for the law to seize, and an active military threat, gave legitimacy to an extrajudicial killing.




That's a given in all this, but everything we're talking about relates to official conduct of the office. Its actually kind of hard to construct scenarios where the issue isnt' an official act within his duties.
I mean if they were going after Trump for jaywalking or something, or shooting up heroin. But even in the contrived scenario of ordering an assassination through the military- that's clearly an official action as commander-in-chief




Even if you throw that out, you're still stuck with the two big issues:
1. the founding fathers very explicitly intended impeachment as the recourse against a president being tyrannical or corrupt. They spent a whole lot of time thinking about how to rein him in, and they gave explicit methods to do that: Checking his powers in the courts by review, denying his picks and funding through congress, and impeaching him to remove him from office and open him up to indictment and jeopardy
2. any weaponization of the courts against the president's person in the absence of impeachment is clearly an end run around the separation of powers and gives the judiciary the means to infringe on the presidency. And that's seen most obviously in the colorado example, where a state court can simply wave a magic wand and declare that the president is illegitimate and holds no powers- denying the entirety of his constitutional role, with no act of congress, no impeachment, no will of the voters.



The founding fathers very much intended for the executive to be a quasi king, else they wouldn't have made him in the first place. They recognized the necessity of a unitary executive that can act decisively, and modelled it after the king. They put all the methods in place to restrain him from abusing the office, but they did not make him a powerless figurehead that can be removed at the whim of any court either. It was the founding fathers who came up with that explicit requirement of "two thirds of the senate" to remove a president, so it sure seems like they counted on that very case of 'having support of 34% of the senate'



The thing is, we're still looking at the judiciary infringing on the president in all the cases. Everything they're flinging at Trump is an attempt to subvert the presidency, whether to use the courts to stop Trump from becoming president by poisoning the election, or to deny the results of the election and try to have his victory overturned. In all cases, its a direct attack on the separation of powers and that principle of proportionality, and above all else, on the civil fiber of our system. American democracy only works when we all agree to play by the rules and respect the outcome when the people's will is made manifest. Trying to have the judiciary bar a candidate or deny his win or lock him up so he can't rule- all just ways for uncivil actors to try to refuse a free and fair democratic election and the passing of full executive power to the next president. The judiciary has no role in any of this, save to restrain itself and make clear its own inability to interfere

Holy fucking shit dude it is literally impossible to know ANYTHING about the founding of the country and come within a thousand miles of this conclusion.

Holy shit I've never seen somebody so catastrophically wrong as you are right now. This is first grade knowledge.

No they literally didn't. There's so much writing from both the founding fathers on this subject as well as 250 years of academic discourse around our constitution. Youre mental if this is your takeaway.

If the founding fathers didn't want a unitary executive modelled after a king than they wouldn't have put one in the constitution and we'd just have a parliament. The president exists precisely because they wanted a quasi king, one operating under restraints that kept him from becoming a unilateral tyrant (like Joe Biden is trying to do). If it was up to John Adams he'd be 'his elective majesty' or 'his mightiness' or 'his highness, protector of liberties'. It was up to Washington, who said Mr President 'and nothing more'. It was right at the heart of the squabble between federalists and antifederalists in the early days of the country, and it was clear that the compromise struck was to give us a unitary executive, without the unaccountability of a king.

Again, the presidency exists because they considered such a republic with no executive, and rejected it. They wanted a commander in chief, an executive with the power to make unilateral decisions, but checked in power by congress. Not by the whims of the courts.

They didn't put one in the constitution, which is why it took over 200 years for some crackpots to fabricate the idea of a unity executive.

Afaik, the Constitution does not explicitly say that successful conviction in an impeachment trial is necessary to open up the otherwise fully immune president to indictment and jeopardy. You're also making a daring assumption: that impeachment was intended not just as the political recourse against a corrupt, criminal or tyrannical president, but as the only recourse for any kind of transgressions by the president.



Agreed, but the word "weaponization" does a lot of heavy lifting here. In the Colorado case, the courts are being weaponized for a political end, but I just fundamentally disagree with the notion that any kind of prosecution of the president would automatically make for a weaponization. Hypothetically: if Trump shoots somebody in the head in the middle of Times Square, with thousands of cameras catching it, but 34 senators for whatever reason refused to impeach him, then it would not be a weaponization of the courts to prosecute him for the murder...






The president doesn't have to enjoy blanket immunity to achieve this goal. The Constitution quite clearly ties the judiciary's hand and sets a really high standard for barring a candidate or charging a president. Even without blanket immunity, they can't just go after him because they don't like his nose.


This is the requirement they set for the political process of impeachment, for a president to face the most severe political consequence for his actions.




Agreed, but that applies to all sides, including Trump, who did not accept the outcome of the 2020 election and tried his best to bend the rules beyond the breaking point so that he could stay in power against the will of the people. He only "played by the rules" via leaving office after it had become obvious that he would not find the political or legal support for overturning Biden's election as the next POTUS. Your entire line of reasoning only works if one assumes that Democrats did indeed blatantly steal the 2020 election.

What Democrats and their supporters in public office are doing right now is damaging the civil fiber of American democracy, just like the various shenanigans they pulled off during his presidency to stymie and subvert his agenda. But Trump is far from an innocent victim here, his own actions between Nov 2020 and Jan 2021 also inflicted severe damage on American democracy.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 12 2024 04:52pm

Just gonna throw this in.

The constitution DOES NOT set a high standard for barring a candidate. Anybody under 35 is barred, people who weren't American citizens when they were born, and so is anybody who tried to do an insurrection. There are many ways you can be inelligable with no required court case and the bar is not particularly high to remove somebody from candidacy.

As I said before, you do not have an inherent constitutional right to run for office or be on the ballot in any particular state (states have the explicit right in the constitution to administer theor own elections). It's actually a pretty low bar.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 12 2024 04:53pm