The XPOTUS racked up another first-in-history court ruling yesterday that already has US Supreme Court law clerks cancelling their Christmas vacations:
Colorado’s top court ruled on Tuesday that former President Donald J. Trump is disqualified from holding office again because he engaged in insurrection with his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, an explosive ruling that is likely to put the basic contours of the 2024 election in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Colorado Supreme Court was the first in the nation to find that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which disqualifies people who engage in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it — applies to Mr. Trump, an argument that his opponents have been making around the country.
In the Colorado court’s lengthy ruling on Tuesday, the justices there reversed a Denver district judge’s finding last month that Section 3 did not apply to the presidency. They affirmed the district judge’s other key conclusions: that Mr. Trump’s actions before and on Jan. 6, 2021, constituted engaging in insurrection, and that courts had the authority to enforce Section 3 against a person whom Congress had not specifically designated.
“A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the justices wrote. “Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado secretary of state to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”
The Post has four takeaways:
1. The historical and political impact may exceed the direct impact
The decision is at once explosive and likely to have little direct impact on the 2024 election.
Colorado has trended blue in recent decades and is not considered a competitive state in presidential elections, having given President Biden a 13.5-point victory in 2020. That made it the 14th-bluest state — the kind of state that if Trump ever won it, he would most likely secure more than enough electoral votes to be elected.
2. The court disagreed with a judge who ruled presidents were different
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars from “any office, civil or military, under the United States,” anyone who takes an oath “as an officer of the United States ... to support the Constitution of the United States [who] shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace...ruled that Section 3 wasn’t meant to pertain to presidents.
3. A Trump traffic jam is converging on the U.S. Supreme Court
Already in the last week or so, special counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to fast-track a decision on Trump’s claims to presidential immunity from his election-subversion indictment. Then the Supreme Court signaled it would review the use of a popular charge against hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants, including Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding. Some judges have rejected or expressed skepticism about that charge’s applicability.
4. A long-running 14th Amendment effort reaches a milestone
The decision is the culmination of a long-running effort to disqualify not just Trump but other Republicans over Jan. 6.
Efforts to disqualify members of Congress including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and now-former congressman Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) failed, in part, because it was harder to directly attach them to the events of Jan. 6.
I believe this was the correct, historical application of the 14th Amendment, and at the same time a risky strategy. Under any plain-language reading of the Constitution and the history of its adoption, the President is an officeholder, not a monarch, and so subject to the laws of the country. And the 14th Amendment exists precisely because Federal officeholders made war against the Constitution in order to preserve slavery.
But today's Republican Party bears no resemblance to the Republicans who wrote the Amendment in 1868, having decided that the only way to handle a dangerous fascist in their party was to join him. The XPOTUS continues to yell about "election fraud" as part of his Big Lie, so obviously he'll spin the Colorado case as proof of it. A reasonable person might think of it like killing your parents and then begging sympathy as an orphan, but clearly a third of the US have left reason behind in the 1960s.
We're a week and a half from 2024, and the times just keep getting more interesting...