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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The Colorado Supreme Court holds:

A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. The court stays its ruling until January 4, 2024, subject to any further appellate proceedings.

[recent related discussion, slightly older]

The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.

How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:

As President Trump, argues and the Electors do not contest, section 1-1-113’s procedures do not provide common tools for complex fact-finding: preliminary evidentiary or pre-trial motions hearings, subpoena powers, basic discovery, depositions, and time for disclosure of witnesses and exhibits. This same concern was raised in Frazier; the then-Secretary argued that “it is impossible to fully litigate a complex constitutional issue within days or weeks, as is typical of a section 1-1-113 proceeding.”...

Despite clear requirements, the district court did not follow section 1-4-1204’s statutory timeline for section 1-1-113 claims. The proceeding below involved two delays that, respectively, violated (1) the requirement that the merits hearing be held within five days of the challenge being lodged, and (2) the requirement that the district court issue its order within forty-eight hours of the merits hearing.

And the other dissent:

Thus, based on its interpretation of Section Three, our court sanctions these makeshift proceedings employed by the district court below—which lacked basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and the opportunity for a fair trial—to adjudicate a federal constitutional claim (a complicated one at that) masquerading as a run-of-the-mill state Election Code claim...

and

Even with the unauthorized statutory alterations made by the district court, the aggressive deadlines and procedures used nevertheless stripped the proceedings of many basic protections that normally accompany a civil trial, never mind a criminal trial. There was no basic discovery, no ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, no workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and no final resolution of many legal issues affecting the court’s power to decide the Electors’ claim before the hearing on the merits.

There was no fair trial either: President Trump was not offered the opportunity to request a jury of his peers; experts opined about some of the facts surrounding the January 6 incident and theorized about the law, including as it relates to the interpretation and application of the Fourteenth Amendment generally and Section Three specifically; and the court received and considered a partial congressional report, the admissibility of which is not beyond reproach.

Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?

The district court also credited the testimony of Professor Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, whom it had “qualified . . . as an expert in political extremism, including how extremists communicate, and how the events leading up to and including the January 6 attack relate to longstanding patterns of behavior and communication by political extremists.”

He testified, according to the court’s summary, that (1) “violent far-right extremists understood that [President] Trump’s calls to ‘fight,’ which most politicians would mean only symbolically, were, when spoken by [President] Trump, literal calls to violence by these groups, while [President] Trump’s statements negating that sentiment were insincere and existed to obfuscate and create plausible deniability,”

There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.

Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.

If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.

This whole quagmire could be avoided if republicans simply let go of Trump and supported someone not so old and so indicted, but they love marching into a trap.

  • -23

Or Democrats could, "simply," not invent novel legal theories to prosecute their political enemies. What's Game Theory predict if one side defects while the one side does not?

... that the other side will eventually defect, like Democrats are doing now.

I called that any form of trust-based equilibrium was toast way back when Reps stole a Supreme Court seat. I cannot overemphasize what an effect that event had in re-framing what politics was about and what the Republicans were like for politically engaged Dems who weren't already maximally cynical.

At the time I hoped that Democrats would defect in ways that merely rebalanced the court to correct for that theft, and let things return to a stable equilibrium otherwise. But, no, touching the court was considered beyond the pale by the highest levels of the Democratic party, so instead it's the lower levels of the party defecting in various corners in a decentralized way.

New hope is 'defeating' Trump would be enough to pacify those elements and get back to equilibrium. Not holding my breath though.

  • -21

Escalation is not a great move for the country, even if it makes you personally feel good.

I'm sure Republicans can point to Bork and say it "really" started there. There a million other slights and violations of norms in the past.

Using smaller violations of norms in the past is never a good reason to justify larger ones now since, using the same logic, the other party can retaliate in an even bigger way.

Being removed from a primary ballot in one state is much, much, much smaller than losing a Supreme Court justice.

  • -14

What number of states removing Trump from the primary ballot will count for you as being larger than losing a Supreme Court Justice? What number of states removing Trump from the general ballot will count for you as being larger than losing a Supreme Court Justice? Set a goal post in the here and now, before we get to the culmination of this trend, so that we can look back and gauge whether they ended up escalating or not.

What number of states removing Trump from the primary ballot will count for you as being larger than losing a Supreme Court Justice?

I don't know, maybe 500?

Given that doing that would pretty much guarantee the Republicans a landslide win for whichever candidate they run instead and also for the Senate and House, this would have basically zero negative impact on their political aspirations and instead probably help them a lot.

Whereas, a Supreme Court seat is probably the most influential and consequential position in the entire government, it's the holy grail of political footballs, it's why you turn out to elect your side's president even if you find him tiresome or awful and don't really care who governs beyond that.

  • -11

Whereas, a Supreme Court seat is probably the most influential and consequential position in the entire government, it's the holy grail of political footballs, it's why you turn out to elect your side's president

Big oof. You're not going to convince anyone that it's not an escalation unless 500 states remove Trump from the ballot. The fact that you think this is even a plausible response is pretty indicative of bad faith, since you're all up and down this thread saying, 'Don't worry, it's just one, and it's just a primary,' to now see that you actually think that it being literally all of them for the general election would be totally fine. Like you've pre-planned an execution of the Law of Merited Impossibility.

Becoming a banana republic is clearly an escalation compared to parliamentary tactics/heresthetics.

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