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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5356 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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Newsweek reports that we have more volunteers:

Republican lawmakers in three swing states have announced their plan to remove President Joe Biden from their state ballots.

Aaron Bernstine of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Cory McGarr of the Arizona House of Representatives and Charlice Byrd of the Georgia House of Representatives released a joint statement on Thursday announcing their plan to remove Biden from the 2024 general election ballots in those three states.

While their letter says that they plan to or are in the process to "introduce legislation", it's not clear from a quick search if they've done so, or even what that legislation would look like, nor how it would, in their words, "allow ALL candidates to be on the ballot in all states". It's far from obvious that they could get legislation through their respective legislatures within the necessary time period before the general election, or even at all: of the three states, only Georgia has a Republican governor, and it's unlikely Kemp will jump onto this particular grenade. The trio don't even have a particularly coherent theory for why and what disqualifying specific act applies.

So this is grift, and a publicity stunt, and dumber.

On the other hand, unlike Colorado or California, all three are states that matter: there are election models that treat them as swing states, not background temperature and a joke. It's a good thing that a lot of people talking about fucking with ballots hasn't caused problems in recent years, and that there aren't far-more-dangerous attacks that these games make more prominent.

Fucking hell. I saw @IGI-111’s comment, and thought about saying “that’s ridiculous, there’s no fig leaf for disqualifying Biden.” Then I remembered the fig leaf never really mattered. But I wasn’t expecting volunteers so fast.

Is this about Hunter? No, it’s about “insurrection” at the southern border. That doesn’t even make sense. At least if they’d have to pass legislation, it means they don’t have a Colorado-style process for removal, I guess.

I continue to be disappointed that no one involved in this election is going to face real consequences for their grandstanding, up until the point where the whole edifice collapses.

I have some for your reading pleasure.

Biden supported and gave encouragement to BLM riots which among other things included CHAZ.

Biden knew the renter moratorium was unconstitutional. His advisors told him as such. The SCOTUS said this is illegal but since you told us you are ending it we will let you end it in an orderly fashion. He then said “fuck it — I will extend it and hope it will take months or years to overturn what I knew was against the constitutional Order.

Biden conspired with others in the Obama administration to frustrate the peaceful transmission of power to the Trump administration from by trying to sabotage that admin via the bureaucracy including Biden suggesting trying to trap Flynn using the laughable Logan act (has some similarity to Trump — sure in theory he was exercising what is facially a legal authority but the local authority could say that was pretext).

Yeah, none of those things count. I don’t think Watergate would have counted, and that was leading a government arm in actual crimes against Americans. Trump’s stunt may or may not have counted, but without a conviction or even a criminal charge, there’s no way.

Yeah, none of those things count.

The text of the Fourteenth Amendment specifies "insurrection or rebellion against" the Constitution of the United States. Conspiring (within the Executive Branch) to issue orders that violate its plain textual explicit separation of powers (which SCOTUS ruled those orders did) sounds at least as plausibly in violation as Trump "raising an army."

(Although this would probably effectively rule out any incumbent president running for re-election, to which I probably say yeschad.jpg)

I believe "the same" refers back to "the United States", not to "the Constitution". It makes no sense to speak of rebellion against a constiution, and barely more sense to refer to giving aid and comfort to enemies of the Constitution. And of course the original public meaning of the clause was that it meant rebellion against the US.

I would note, however, that your interpretation would be very bad for Trump; given that the J6 rioters were attempting to stop a Constitutionally prescribed procedure, the argument that they were rebelling against the Constitution is stronger than the argument that they were rebelling against the US.

This is exactly my point. In fact, I think the case against Biden is cleaner in that the eviction order was one of the most brazen “I know it’s illegal but I don’t care” moves done in decades.

Trump may very well believe that laws were broken and therefore his action on Jan 6 was actually consistent with his oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Biden has no such excuse.

Trump’s stunt didn’t either. The constitutional provision was pretty clear that it was referring to raising an army and starting a war, not a badly planned protest that turned into a riot which may or may not have been a coup attempt.

Those are to my mind the same category as J6. Why do you think they are different or don’t count?

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