It was a thrilling Tuesday evening after the Colorado Supreme Court handed down its decision on whether TFG was disqualified from holding office again after supporting, if not leading, the 1/6 insurrection, wasn’t it? The opinion was tightly written and it forcefully rebutted the question of whether TFG had been an officer of the United States, and provided a dense thicket of Republican and extremist arguments regarding textuality and states rights. This is the easiest SCOTUS decision they will ever write, right?
Well, it would be if we lived in Bizarro World. It’d be short and sweet and to the point, with long footnotes of corroborating past opinions, TFG would be SOL and we could move on to the next fascist politician. But we don’t live in that fabled land, and so the court is going to contort itself into patently untenable positions to make sure that TFG remains on every ballot in November. And they won’t care about the blow back.
I’m saying this because this court has already done that in the Dobbs decision, where Alito used a 13th century legal treatise to justify his decision:
The Supreme Court justice is actually revisiting the 1250s, when the judge Henry de Bracton completed his summation of English law and custom “De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae.” Alito’s opinion, after mocking the Roe decision for its “discussion of abortion in antiquity,” then provides a discussion of abortion in medieval times: “Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has ‘struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated … he commits homicide.’ ”… Bracton does have a lot to say about monsters, duels, bastardy, concubines, sturgeon “and other royal fish,” the “pillory and the ducking-stool,” and “a judgment with infamy.”
If the extremists on the court didn’t care about how stupid they looked in the Dobbs decision, then they’re not going to care this time. They now have the power they crave and there’s no upside for them if Biden is re-elected.
We can live in hope I guess until the court agrees to hear the case, like Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation on Wednesday:
That said, perhaps since it’s the holidays, I’m still guilty of believing there is a chance the Supreme Court sides with Colorado. There’s a chance that Gorsuch listens to himself. There’s a chance that Roberts’s political preferences are such that he understands the grave threat a second Trump presidency poses to the country and the Supreme Court’s own power. It’s a fool’s chance, but I choose to believe that there’s a chance that the law prevails over Trump.
The reality is that there have been numerous inflection points where the GOP could have made sure that TFG could not hold office ever again. And at every one of those points, the GOP has failed our democracy. I can’t see how that changes this time.
The Who know what I’m talking about: