James Comer isn’t an attorney. He’s a farmer from western Kentucky. He was chosen to chair the House Oversight Committee for one overriding reason: to investigate the Biden family and find incriminating links to foreign entities. Instead, the Committee’s Democrats released a report showing it was Trump and his family with those incriminating ties, not Biden. Trump has been a crook, cheat and grifter his entire life. thdere was never any reason to think he would change once he slipped into the White House.
Unlike Comer, NY Times columnist, Alabaman David French is an attorney… and like Comer, a conservative, though not a MAGAt. An evangelical and career-long homophobe, he claims he changed his mind on homophobia at the end of 2022. His column Thursday, The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong. Keep in mind, unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, Trump is officially not on the GOP primary ballot in Colorado (and Maine)
French read “the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so, I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be dangerous or destabilizing. There is already a surge in violent threats against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that ‘rejecting Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.’ Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested— and I agree— that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment ‘is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react’ to an adverse ruling. This is where we are and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the ‘but the consequences’ argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.”
French isn’t buying the argument. “It’s time,” he wrote, “to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot— without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice… [T]he plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional.”
What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”
…[T]he clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It was an effort to change the government of the United States.
…[T]he most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.
So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000 the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.
Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution— especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.
Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.
Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new.