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Notes -
Trump case out on him being an insurrectionists.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf
Compared to the Reddit debates and how the SC would prevent this as a non-lawyer I thought the opinion was fairly basic and simple. It seems to me that they just declared it a Feds power in Federal elections and the States don’t get a say. Personally, I did come to a belief that it was self-executing.
I think they avoided really touching on all the novel legal theories both ways going around on Reddit or twitter.
It came down to what I believe was one of my original views that letting States have any say in declaring someone an insurrectionists would be a complete clusterfuck and basically turn into state legislatures electing Presidents. Therefore they declared it a federal power.
I would call this pragmatic versus legally correct in my opinion. They avoided 100 page treatise on whether the President is an office holder.
I predicted something between 7-2 and 9-0. 9-0 seems better for the nation.
Because there are (and perhaps will always be) more Red states than Blue states (in terms of who is elected to state offices) because of geographic and demographic population distribution, it simply didn’t make sense for the progressive justices to allow the striking off of candidates by state officials. Returning power to the states is, broadly, OK-to-bad for the left and OK-to-good for the right.
Hot take: what if the judiciary isn’t making decisions based on states’ rights? Maybe the Constitution is just, you know, actually clear on this one. 14.5 says Congress has to do it.
I guess I still believe the Supreme Court splits more on philosophical than partisan lines. Those are correlated with, perhaps even a proxy for liberal vs. conservative politics, but they’re not the same thing.
Either way, I think states’ rights are a dead issue. They’re more popular with reactionaries, libertarians, and contrarians than with the mainstream.
States' rights to what, exactly? Anticommandeering doctrine is alive and well. Wayfair expanded state ability to levy revenue extraterritorially, and gave the dormant commerce clause some whacks. States even won the power to judicially interfere with federal enforcement and regulatory policy in Massachusetts v. EPA
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