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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Apparently all the other sections of the 14th amendment can be enforced by courts without enabling legislation.

Can they?

You can't just bring a generic lawsuit alleging someone infringed your rights. Even where there is a statute, the courts have been famously willing to find exceptions and excuses. Instead, you must show harm -- in many cases, be prosecuted or threatened with prosecution! -- and then the courts can find the statute void, either as-applied to you or in general.

That's nowhere near the framework people are trying to stretch to this case. There wasn't even Colorado law allowing this sort of challenge, or setting a duty to the state to check ballot qualifications. Instead, the Colorado courts had to go so far as to find that it would be a wrongful act and thus mandated.

And apparently even section 3 is self executing in regard to state candidates.

I don't think this is true, or part of the opinion. Even your favorite example of Couy Griffin had a state quo warranto statute authorizing the matter.

Indeed, why is it that a state can't ban an insurrectionist from the ballot, but can just legislate away presidential elections entirely and appoint electors some other arbitrary way?

I'm not sure that courts would actually allow it, given other jurisprudence, but more immediately the rules in the Constitution about the Presidential election do focus more heavily on the candidates than the processes. That may not be your ideal, but the law does not have to match your policy preferences.

Hopefully at some point Congress will have the good sense to pass a bill resolving all these issues for the future, once the Trump drama has passed.

I'd be more impressed by a call for prosecutors to enforce the laws on the books, but I don't think you can get what you want from that.