It's snowing today. Normally, snow in the winter months in eastern Pennsylvania would not necessitate a comment, but there are parts of southeastern PA that haven't had snow in over 700 days. Without waxing nostalgic, I have many memories of huge snow piles created by snow plows in the parking lot behind our Mt Airy home in the 1960's, as well as similar scenes at our home in Horsham during the 1970's.
Of course, as a child, snow meant much more than the inconvenience of shoveling, and having enough food in the house for a few days. So when my wife and I moved to Perkasie in the late 1980's, we experienced snow events as both adults and through the eyes of our children once we began our family in the 1990's. One of our favorite pictures depicts our son and daughter and a neighbor child bundled up against the cold, surrounded all around (and above) by huge piles of snow. I also, to this day, remember seeing my daughter's face, flush against the lower window of our front door, breath fogging the window as she peered out at me shoveling off the front porch.
We were unfortunate to have street parking during those years, so every snow fall meant a neighborhood effort to dig out the cars and clear the sidewalks. While I certainly don't miss the snow, the neighborhood camaraderie was priceless.
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My last post discussed the immunity question being debated in the courts concerning Donald Trump. While the Supreme Court decided not to address it yet, it is conventional wisdom that once the DC District Court makes its decision, an appeal to the Supreme Court will follow. Here is a link to that post.
https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2023/12/scotus-decision-on-trump-immunity.html
However, since that post, decisions from Colorado and Maine concerning Trump's presence on the Republican Primary ballot have occurred. While the process for each was different, the result was the same; the removal of Trump from the ballot.
In Colorado, after a judicial process in which a suit was filed by voters in that state to determine if Trump was eligible to run for president based on section 3 of the 14th amendment which says, and I am paraphrasing, that no person shall be an officer of the United States if they have previously taken an oath to support the Constitution but have engaged in or provided aid to those who participate in an insurrection. In Maine, the Secretary of State was the person who determined Trump should be removed, in this case after a trial in which proof of his action surrounding the 2020 presidential election and all the ways he tried to illegally stay in power proved he was an insurrectionist.
This amendment was created and established immediately following the Civil War as a way to prevent anyone who fought for the Confederacy against the US Government from taking office. Seems kind of obvious, except that since so many of those who served in the Confederate Army were the leaders of the southern states, both political and military, the creators of that amendment knew that the voters of those states might look to those same leaders to represent them in Congress, and so they felt it necessary to make it illegal for those very same people who actively fought against the United States to then become lawmakers.
There is no real middle ground here. People who engage in insurrection against the United States should not be allowed to run for office. The specious arguments that the Presidency is not an office of the government, or that Trump, as president did not take an oath to support that Constitution (the exact words he stated, hand on bible, were to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution which sound even stronger than support, to me) should be dismissed out of hand.
The real question is, does engage in insurrection require conviction of said crime. And, of course, is Trump guilty of such.
In both Colorado and Maine, a judicial process occurred with witnesses and testimony as a result of Republican voters wanting to know if they would be wasting their vote for Trump in a primary, then only to have him be disqualified for the general election. In Maine, the secretary of state was empowered to make that decision, while in Colorado, when a judge ruled that Trump did engage in insurrection but that should not disqualify him, the appeal went the Colorado Supreme Court, and a 4-3 vote resulted in the decision that the original judge was wrong not to disqualify him.
I present these details as a reminder that every state has different rules for running its elections. That, in fact, states rights in the area of voting rules has long been controversial, which is why states have different early voting rules, mail-in voting procedures, voter registration requirements and rules, etc.
While the right for every American citizen to vote is, at best, assumed by the founders, it is various amendments to the Constitution that have delineated who is a citizen, and who is allowed to vote. It took an Amendment to grant citizenship to anyone born on American soil (before that Blacks/slave were not considered citizens, and therefore not allowed to vote), it took an Amendment to give women the right to vote, it took an amendment to allow 18 year old citizens to vote.
In other words, the founders assumed American citizens should be allowed to vote, but their definition did not include at lease half of the population (women), and certainly did not include children of slaves who were born here. In fact, originally, common men did not vote for president. In the beginning, a bunch of presidents were chosen by Congress as the founders, as a group, did not trust the everyday, working men of the day to be able to make a correct choice for someone as important as president.
So, should the current Justices of the United States Supreme Court continue to lean into their strict literal interpretation of the Constitution and the belief that anything not specifically spelled out in the Constitution as being the purview of the federal government should therefore be controlled by the states (see recent abortion decision), it is possible that they could rule that Colorado and Maine have every right to remove a candidate from the ballot.
That being said, I don't think this will happen for any of a number of reasons, foremost being that by allowing states to use an interpretation of the 14th amendment as it applies to an insurrection, without a precise definition of whether engaging in an insurrection requires conviction, and whether gleefully watching on TV for hours while the Capitol is attacked by "your" people, and then promising to pardon those convicted of various crimes related to an attempt to subvert the peaceful transition of power, equates to providing aid and comfort qualify as reasons for disqualification, could be disastrous. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that should SCOTUS uphold either states' decision, it will only be a matter of days until Texas or Florida or some other state with Trump devotees, rules that Biden should be removed from their state ballots based on their definition of this section of the 14th amendment.
So, assuming they rule that Colorado and Maine and any other state cannot remove a candidate under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, does that mean that section is now null and void? Clearly, SCOTUS will not be willing to alter the Constitution in that way. My guess is that they will uphold the intent of Section 3, but will rule that Congress must flesh out the meaning of this section when it comes to national elections. In other words, if a state court rules that a candidate for an in-state election should be removed from a ballot for Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, fine. But only Congress can determine specifics for eliminating candidates at the national level.
Personally, I believe Donald J Trump is an insurrectionist. I believe that a president has even more responsibility to uphold the Constitution, so the bar for eliminating a presidential candidate from running for such an important office should be lower than for other local and state elections. Because remember, those people who fought with Capitol police, smashed windows, threatened various legislators including the Vice President, did so because Trump told them to. Because he lied about the election being stolen, lied about massive election fraud. Because courts have determined that Fox News was guilty of libel to the tune of $785 million to Dominion Voting Systems for promoting guests on their shows who also lied about election fraud. Because Rudy Giuliani was found guilty of libel against the two poll workers from Georgia who he (and the president) publicly accused of voter fraud without evidence.
But even more than all of this, who on planet Earth believes that Trump will accept the results of the 2024 presidential election should he lose again? He has no respect for democratically held elections, and frankly, no respect for the American electorate. When asked in 2020 if he would honor the results of that upcoming election, his response, live, on TV, was, we'll see. In other words, if I win, I accept the results, if I lose I cry fraud.
Why do we want candidates for any public service position, whether dog catcher or president, to say that only when I win, will I accept an election result. Election deniers have no business appearing on any ballot in the United States of America, not because there is a rule or law or "norm", but because it is what we should demand, as voters, of our candidates. The fact that millions of Trump supporters don't get this very basic fact is the primary reason why, sadly, I believe we have already lost our democracy. And why, regardless of how SCOTUS rules on this or the immunity question, history will mark these times, the effect of Donald Trump, and his ability to convince Americans to turn away from the foundations of our republic, as the beginning of when another great country collapsed from within, like so many have in the past.
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