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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.
For those curious about the specific reasoning, I think the concurring opinion of Sotomayor, Kagan, and Brown-Jackson covers this cleanly:
I would describe this as obviously correct. No reasonable person could review the history of the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment and arrive at the conclusion that it grants additional state power over selecting Presidents.
This feels to me like a pretty disingenuous interpretation by the court, though.
Like, the question wasn't 'Can a state choose to take someone off the ballot just because they feel like it?' That wasn't what the states said they were doing, that wasn't the legal argument being presented.
The legal argument being presented was 'the federal government has passed a law that insurrectionists may not be elected, we are following that federal law.'
That's not the states having power over the federal government, it's the states following rules set by the federal government, precisely in line with the original intent. Like, the states not electing insurrectionists is exactly what they laws says the states have to do, and the states claim they are just following that law.
Whether or not some states want to follow that law for political reasons, and are being extra-scrupulous about following the law in cases where it benefits them, seem wholly irrelevant to whether they are following the law properly or not.
It seems like any attempt to rule on the law has to answer whether or not the state is following the law as written.
To instead say 'you following a law because you want to follow it is sort of like you breaking the law to get your own way, which we don't like, so we rule against that without answering the question of what the law says' seems really blatantly politically motivated rather than legally correct.
And states don't get to decide to whom that law applies. There are lots of cases where states don't get to decide.
Are state courts not allowed to enforce any other part of the 14th amendment?
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