Fascism is in its legal phase in the US. Any fascist with sufficient party support in congress cannot be held accli table for an insurrection.
Incredible really
It was unanimous…
Not exactly, liberal justices discented in specifics of who could be expected to make a determination. Agreed it can’t be a single state, disagreed on federal courts, other bodies making a determination. Conservative justices decided it would be only congress.
In any case, they all seemed to find it can’t be the states based more on consequences than law and unanimous decisions don’t reduce the slide to facism any more than a split decision will.
The 14th section five says it’s congress that makes the decision of eligibility.
That said, how an election is run is up to the states. They’re already making determinations and kicking people off, anyhow, weird how that happens.
I mean, it doesn’t really say that but it is now the law of the land anyway.
In my lay person opinion, they wrote the decision to get the result they wanted.
Which during questioning seemed to be: 1)they don’t want the states to do it because of the potential consequences 2)they don’t want to decide each case themselves (the SC) 3) they don’t want the Federal Court circuits to decide since it would filter up to the SC (see 2)
So according to the majority the only body left to decide is congress. Which of course has the consequence of ensuring it will never actually be done.
So if you want to do an insurrection in the US, just make sure to have a personality cult built up around you and enough members of Congress living in fear of you and your violent supporters to stop congress ever enacting consequences for your failed attempts.
Do you really want SCROTUS deciding things?
In a functioning system a judicial branch is important. In this system? No more than they do apparently.
Section 5 says Congress can enforce, not quite the same thing. There’s actually precedent that you don’t need an act of Congress for section 3 to apply, and nothing in text that says you need it.
If you look at the non-confederate who got nipped by the 14th, the process was he got elected as a representative, and they then held a floor vote that determined he was ineligible due to an espionage act conviction.
Yes, he was already ineligible the election happened before the conviction, but that was the process for unseating him.
I don’t know how that would apply to a POTUS (probably take both houses of congress,).
Wow, the corrupt supreme court that’s in the pocket of the far right protected their party’s criminal candidate? Color me shocked!
So fucking predictable. They’ve just pissed away the last few drops of their credibility.
The decision was unanimous.
The decision was unanimous that states can’t decide this. 4 of them think the prohibition is self-executing, which would have kept Trump off anyway but nationwide
Self executing what does that even mean in this context?
“Oh hey Trump I know you were on the ballot but it magically disappeared because the universe knows what you did last
summerwinter. People don’t have to enforce the law, some laws just magically enforce themselves!”Meaning you don’t need some action to invoke it, it’s just there. You can’t get on the ballot if you’re under 35, an immigrant, or a traitor.
Yeah and we can see how that “works.” It takes a person to enforce it, that’s what happened, and then the SCOTUS said “nah not like that, it needs to be magic.”
I should clarify: a few of them aren’t in the right’s pocket. Arguably they are too biased the other way, but the court had traditionally been balanced fairly well most of the time. Not so for the last decade or more.
I get that the argument presented to them wasn’t the best, and that’s where the unanimity came from. But let’s face it, the court has been a joke for a while now. And for whatever reason, I am not at all surprised that they sided with Trump.
Edit: also, to say it was a unanimous decision isn’t exactly accurate. It was more complicated than that.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/supreme-court-metadata-sotomayor-trump-dissent.html
The other way of looking at this is that conservative States can’t boot Biden from the ballot either.
And you could bet your ass that if the ruling went the other way Biden would be off the ballot in every red state too. And that would be a much bigger mess than Trump being on all the ballots.Except justifying Biden as having committed insurrection is a hell of a lot harder than Trump, who was found to have committed insurrection as a matter of fact.
It protects Biden, sure, but from an extremely remote possibility, instead of an imminent one.
Since when have they ever needed to justify anything?
They don’t justify it to anyone else or themselves, they just act.That same logic suggests that Red states would kick Biden off the ballot if they’d like regardless of what the Supreme Court says.
In order to legally classify Biden as an insurrectionist, they’d have to come up with hare-brained legal gymnastics and then they’d need, like, a majority in the supreme court to rubber-stamp their…
oh.
Eh, for what it’s worth, SCOTUS has said it’s Congress’s job to determine that, because the self-executing portion of the Constitution apparently needs an executor. 🙃
IF that executor happens to be consisting of the right party members.
They’ve been setting that up for weeks, though. They started calling the migrant crisis in the Southern border an “invasion”. You can bet that if the Court held up the Colorado ruling, we would have a ruling in short order in Texas (possibly AZ too) that Biden was ineligible for directly causing an invasion. No matter how incorrect that take is.
Oh, that’s right. I live in reality. Silly me.
Why would I want to protect Biden? If he committed crimes while in office, I would want him to be taken off the ballot too.
It’s not about that. They would just make something up and say that’s why they’re doing it. “Something something Hunter Biden” therefore Biden is off the ballot.
Biden doesn’t need protection. The country and the Constitution, by extension, do.
USA beginning to look like Russia…
Something something states rights 🤔
Disappointing but not surprising
Like I’ve said for months. The means of enforcement for sec 3 is early defined in section 5. But all those that called me a bot or paid by Russia thought they knew netter
It’s as simple as: “was he sentenced of insurrection by a court?” No. Then he can’t be kicked off the ballot. Should he be sentenced of insurrection? Another matter altogether (yes, he probably should). Besides, constitutionally there’s nothing that blocks him from running for President even if condemned if I’m not mistaken
Not charged by a court, the US Supreme Court has the opinion that it exclusively has to be Congress to charge him with insurrection.
Which is an insane position to take given how highly partisan congress is, to the point that denying the insurrection even took place is a common everyday occurrence in Trumps party.
So we’ve learned that all it takes to do an insurrection is to have a party that supports it with just enough power to prevent congress acting.
It is a reasonable decision given what the law says, which is all that should matter to a court. No goddamn “spirit of the law” should be invoked, otherwise you enter the realm of the arbitrary. Now, the issue is that the system that should ensure perpetual creative destruction in order to bring out the best and most willing individuals to power has failed to do so, which is the problem we should be focusing on, instead of trying to override reasonable laws in order to prevent this or that lunatic from getting this or that seat
It is a reasonable decision given what the law says, which is all that should matter to a court. No goddamn “spirit of the law” should be invoked, otherwise you enter the realm of the arbitrary.
This is the same court that abandoned standing entirely so they could rule in favor of a bigoted website designer. That ship has sailed.
All laws are arbitrary to Republicans it seems.
It is a reasonable decision given what the law says, which is all that should matter to a court.
There is no way to reconcile this decision, which contradicts the law, as “reasonable” with “what the law says”.
Yeah he was already found to have participated in insurrection by Colorado’s courts as a finding of fact. If the standard was that it has to be proven in court they’ve already done that.
And the supreme court could set a standard and even rule that Colorado didn’t meet it.
During his impeachment trials, the GOP argued that impeachments are not a criminal proceeding, they are a political one- so they acquitted on politics saying that this is for the courts to decide. Now that the matter is in the courts, they argue it’s for congress only, not the courts.
With a justice system like this one, who needs torches and pitchforks? /s
Exactly as intended.
A loop of “he’s not accountable no matter how you try. I’ll just make up reasons why you can’t do it even if it contradicts what I previously said.”
Which is a reasonable take, given the law, which is what should matter to a court
The law, specifically the Constitution, states that no person shall be allowed to hold office who has participated in insurrection. Trump was found to have committed insurrection as a matter of fact by the Colorado Supreme Court.
So the law is not in his favor, and it’s yet another example of SCOTUS carving out exceptions for Conservatives using tortured logic. Our ancestors who fought in the Civil War would be ashamed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday handed a sweeping win to former President Donald Trump by ruling that states cannot kick him off the ballot over his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — bringing a swift end to a case with huge implications for the 2024 election.
The Supreme Court decision removes one avenue to holding Trump accountable for his role in challenging the 2020 election results, including his exhortation that his supporters should march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, when Congress was about to formalize Joe Biden’s win.
The ruling warned of the dangers of a patchwork of decisions around the country that could send elections into chaos if state officials had the freedom to determine who could appear on the ballot for president.
The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — complained in a jointly written concurring opinion that the court had decided more than it needed to by laying out how Section 3 could be enforced by Congress.
The initial lawsuit was filed on behalf of six Colorado voters by the left-leaning government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and two law firms.
They alleged in court papers that Trump “intentionally organized and incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol in a desperate attempt to prevent the counting of electoral votes cast against him.”
The original article contains 915 words, the summary contains 235 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
