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this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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That makes literally zero sense, because the 14th Amendment bars anyone from holding any civil or military office who engaged in insurrection. and before you go on "well durrrrr the presidency isn't an office," the constitution refers to the presidency as the Office of the President of the United States repeatedly:
Article 1, Section 3:
Article 1, section 3:
(This provision is especially important because it means that if the presidency isn't counted as an office the president is literally immune from impeachment because there's no provision in the constitution to actually try the president for impeachment.)
Article 2, section 1:
12th Amendment:
22nd Amendment:
I could go on, but I think you get the point. Claiming that the 14th Amendment doesn't cover the presidency completely ignores the plain text of the entire fucking constitution!
Another fun side effect is that the president not being an office covered under the 14th amendment would also mean they're exempt from the Emoluments clause, though that one might already be dead.......
The Supremely Corrupted of the US will take all of that overwhelmingly evidence into consideration and just say “No, he’s good. If you want to know why, it’s because we said so. If you don’t like the decision, what are you going to do, fire us?”
Go read the opinion. Evidently in drafts of the amendment “president” was included and then later removed.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/12/supreme-court-trump-ballot-removal-colorado-wrong.html
Yeah, because the presidency was already covered by the phrase "any office, civil or military." This very concern is brought up during the congressional debates over ratifying the amendment, and is addressed:
Source: https://stafnelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Congressional-Debates-of-the-14th-Amendment.pdf page 60
So the original people drafting the Amendment understood it to cover the presidency.
That's as clear-cut as it gets right there.
If you know that, then every SCotUS justice knows it.
If SCotUS destroys the 14th Amendment for Trump, they are truly illegitimate.
Yeah, literally the only pathway to ruling Trump is not barred is by throwing out the entire finding of fact by the Colorado supreme court that Trump engaged in an insurrection. It's not impossible since appellate courts do technically have this power, but appellate courts are usually supposed to give extreme deference to lower courts when it comes to their findings of fact--the standard from my brief bit of research is that the lower court's findings must be "clearly erroneous."
So given how batshit our current court is I expect at least two surefire no votes from Thomas and Alito. Gorsuch is probably a yes vote given how much of a strict textualist he's turned out to be, as are the entire liberal bloc. Ironically, Roberts is yet again the most likely swing vote, and I honestly don't know if he'd sign off on disqualifying him. I could see anything from 7-2 in favor of upholding to 5-4 or 6-3 overturning. Considering their recent signal in the form of denying Smith's request for expedited review, I'm... honestly not optimistic.
Wasn't this 9-0 unanimous?
We don't know, all we know iirc is that at least four justices said "nah bro go through the regular appeals process." So reading the tea leaves, at least Thomas and Alito, plus any two of Gorsuch, Roberts, ACB, and Kavanaugh said no, at minimum.
It's hard to say with certainty what this signals about how they'll rule on the various Trump cases, but at minimum it indicates that they either don't realize that he's trying to delay the trials in the hopes he can win the election and have them all dropped, or they don't care that's what he's doing. If they really_don't_ care, it could be because they approve of his actions--and will likely rule in his favor--or simply because they value strict adherence to the regular process even at the potential risk of allowing an unqualified candidate (in the actual constitutional sense) obtaining office and doing whatever damage he can. None of those reasons bode very well for this particular case, IMO.
I fail to see how drafts are relevant except to judges who pretend they can know the minds of the authors by reading tea leaves.