Colorado's Supreme Court kicks Trump off the ballot (WSJ). I wrote earlier forecasting constitutional crisis with next election. Legal chaos is starting right on schedule.
Summary: Both sides are casting their opponents as illegitimate. That justifies profound norm-breaking behavior. Political battles are being fought in the courts, so control of the courts and the judicial system now becomes vital to political success. When you can't afford to lose an election you do anything to win. Scorched earth rules the day.
This affair offers a catch-22 to the Supreme Court. As a partisan chess move, you can't help but admire it. The case is weak, as even the judges voting for it admit. The election is coming up fast. There are many pending state cases to keep Trump off the ballot. The Supreme Court surely does not want to see elections more and more decided by courts. This will likely force the Court to act.
Letting the ruling stand, and having Trump off the ballot in several states, will inflame Trump supporters, and bolster their view that the justice system is hijacked by Democrats. If it is overturned, Democrats will quickly cast it as a "pro-Trump" partisan move, and use it to inflame their campaign to de-legitimize the court. Among other consequences, that will embolden the increasing habit of simply ignoring Supreme Court decisions. The brouhaha may also scare the court over the many election cases that are headed its way like an avalanche in the next year. It is devilishly clever. If it were not so utterly destructive.
The WSJ on these points.
The ruling ... placed the Supreme Court in a position it likely would have preferred to avoid: having to resolve unprecedented legal issues that also ignite strong political passions among the nation’s electorate. ...
A central legal question:
One point of deep disagreement was whether removing Trump from the ballot violated his due process rights, given that he hasn’t been convicted of a crime and the pending criminal charges against him aren’t for insurrection.
... One dissenting justice was particularly vehement in opposition, saying it violated bedrock American principles to remove Trump from the ballot in this fashion.
“Even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past—dare I say, engaged in insurrection—there must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office,” Justice Carlos Samour Jr. wrote.
“I could see the Supreme Court worrying about that and saying if you’re going to disqualify someone you need to give them more of an opportunity to make their case because that’s such a momentous deprivation of liberty and rights,” said [David] Orentlicher, an elected Democrat...
Hypocrisy is hardly new in politics. But it is noteworthy that the party bleating most loudly about "threats to democracy" is so distrustful of democracy that it is waging legal battles to keep Mr. Trump from being democratically elected. If it's so self-evident that Trump violated the Constitution and his oath of office, the correct remedy is to simply let voters not vote for him on that basis. The party supposedly of the little person does not trust that little person to make the most basic decisions.
Pushing political battles into the judicial system really is a threat to democracy. In a lot of semi-autocratic countries, when someone loses an election, the winners go after them on vague charges, impoverish them, family, and supporters, and often put them in jail if not worse. In response, people do everything in their power not to lose elections, no matter how many law and norms get broken along the way. The more political battles end up in court, the closer we come to that state.
I repeat the warning from my last post. This is the tip of the iceberg. We have not just the 92 (is that the latest number?) charges against Trump. Redistricting will be a battleground. Campaign finance charges will be levied. Republicans are gearing up Hunter Biden charges. Every smudged postmark, every extended deadline will end up in court. The Supreme Court may end up making crucial decisions again. The losers will claim illegitimacy of both the winner and the process, and will spend the following 4 years in resistance. Stop now while you can.
(I am moving to Substack. I will cross-post everything in both places until the bugs are worked out.)
from The Grumpy Economist https://ift.tt/cXvzf5I
0 comments:
Post a Comment