“The case turns on a previously obscure provision of the 14th Amendment, which provides that anyone who previously held a high office requiring them to swear an oath supporting the Constitution is forbidden from holding a similar office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against that Constitution.
The Colorado Supreme Court concluded that Trump engaged in an “insurrection” because he spent months falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged.” He encouraged his supporters to “fight,” suggesting that Democrats would “fight to the death” if the shoe were on the other foot. And Trump named then-Vice President Mike Pence as someone who should be targeted by the pro-Trump mob that invaded the Capitol.
But there is precious little case law laying out what this provision of the Constitution means, or defining key terms like “insurrection” or what it means to “engage in” such an attack on the United States. Since the period immediately following the Civil War, there has not been much litigation involving disloyal public officials who joined an insurrection against the very system of government they swore to defend. So courts asked to interpret the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause — including the Supreme Court — must do so without the ordinary guideposts judges look to when reading the Constitution.”
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“In addition to their legal arguments, Colorado Republicans also make a political argument for keeping Trump on the ballot — removing him would deny voters “the ability to choose their Chief Executive through the electoral process.” This purely political argument has garnered sympathy from many observers, including outlets such as the New York Times.
This final argument, if taken seriously by a majority of the justices, could render the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause a dead letter — because it would prevent it from operating in the one circumstance when such a constitutional provision is needed.”
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“allowing insurrectionists with significant public support to stand for office would defeat the whole point of the Constitution’s Insurrection Clause.
Unpopular insurrectionists will never get elected to office in the first place because they are unpopular.”
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“The Colorado GOP does raise one fairly strong legal argument that supports deferring the question of whether Trump should be removed from the 2024 ballot until, at least, after he is convicted of a crime or otherwise determined to have engaged in insurrection by a federal trial court.
In Ownbey v. Morgan (1921), a case that admittedly had nothing to do with the Insurrection Clause, the Supreme Court said that “it cannot rightly be said that the Fourteenth Amendment furnishes a universal and self-executing remedy.” This means that private litigants ordinarily cannot sue to enforce this amendment, absent some state or federal statute authorizing such lawsuits.”
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“the Colorado Supreme Court determined that a state statute permitting voters to challenge candidates’ eligibility to run for office does permit suits seeking to enforce the Insurrection Clause, and states often have the power to pass laws permitting their own courts to enforce the Constitution.”
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“as the Colorado GOP warns the justices, the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision also means that “individual litigants, state courts, and secretaries of state in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia have authority” to determine which candidates must be removed from the ballot for violating the 14th Amendment. And, while there is no reason to believe that Colorado’s judges acted in bad faith when they removed Trump, it’s not hard to imagine what could happen in states with less responsible judges if the Colorado decision is allowed to stand.
Imagine, for example, that the Florida Supreme Court — which is made up entirely of Republican appointees, most of whom were appointed by far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis — were to invent some completely fabricated reason to accuse President Joe Biden of engaging in an insurrection, and then imagine that they invoked this pretextual reason to remove Biden from the 2024 ballot.”
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“Trump wasn’t exactly denied a trial altogether before he was removed from Colorado’s ballot. But, as Justice Carlos Samour wrote in a dissenting opinion, the process Colorado’s courts used to determine that Trump engaged in an insurrection was unusually truncated. It lacked “basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, [and] workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses.” And, as Justice Maria Berkenkotter wrote in her dissent, the Colorado courts relied on a process that “up until now has been limited to challenges involving relatively straightforward issues, like whether a candidate meets a residency requirement for a school board election.”
In any event, the Colorado GOP takes its argument that the 14th Amendment is not self-executing too far, suggesting that Trump cannot be disqualified unless he is convicted in a federal court specifically of violating a criminal statute that uses the magic word “insurrection.” But they raise valid points against allowing each state to have the final word on who can run for president, and against allowing Trump to be removed based on the limited process he received in the Colorado system.”
“We live in a world where nearly 80 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of Donald Trump. These voters are, in many cases, authentic Trumpists: About 70 percent of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen. New research by political scientists Larry Bartels and Nicholas Carnes found that House Republicans who opposed Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election were considerably more likely to lose in a primary or be forced into retirement than Trump-supporting peers.
Trump is not some kind of aberration, a flash in the pan akin to candidates like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in previous cycles. He and — crucially — his worldview are so popular among Republican primary voters that they can’t be beaten by throwing money at someone like Nikki Haley.
That means the 2024 election is not a competition between an ordinary Democrat and an ordinary Republican. It is a choice between an ordinary Democrat and a Republican running on an increasingly open platform of tearing down American democracy. Instead of acknowledging this reality, AFPA has simply chosen to live in a fantasy land where the GOP is still the party of limited government libertarianism — and where Democrats are, implausibly, Trumpism’s mirror image threat to American democracy.
It’s easy to understand the reasons for this flight of fancy. From the point of view of someone who deeply believes in traditional small government conservatism, this election truly is an agonizing choice.
With the exception of free trade, Trump’s last term largely served the super-wealthy’s interests in economic matters — passing a massive regressive tax cut and slashing environmental regulations. But he also poses an existential threat to American democracy, promising a term of instability that could shatter the political calm necessary for the economy to function.
Biden, on the other hand, has worked to bring stability to American democracy. Yet he also has moved to the left on economic matters, in ways that threaten the billionaire vision of an American night-watchman state. In a contest between Trump and Biden, the superrich can’t get what they want the most: political stability paired with a continuing assault on the welfare state.
The support for Haley is a way of avoiding what they see as a terrible choice. It’s a desperation play designed to stave off what they see as certain calamity, an 80-yard Hail Mary thrown to a receiver in sextuple coverage.”
“White college-educated voters are becoming more Democratic as white non-college-educated voters are becoming more Republican. That’s because of the fundamental political change Ruffini says is the underlying issue for all of these shifts. Education is becoming the great divider in American politics, helping to explain Democratic improvements with well-educated white voters and their weaknesses with non-college-educated white voters — and now non-college-educated voters of color too. While class and income used to be better tools for telling differences between the political parties’ coalitions, “[t]oday, how much money you make no longer dictates how you vote,” he writes early on. “A college diploma has replaced income as the new marker of social class and the key dividing line in elections.””
“Hernán Stuchi, a 29-year-old food delivery driver in greater Buenos Aires, grew up as a left-wing activist. During this year’s presidential election in Argentina, he told Vox he would make a starkly different choice, and back Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian trumpeting socially conservative culture war issues and explosive proposals to reshape Argentine society.
“It was a kind of innocence,” he said in October, discussing his previous support for left-wing leaders. “It’s not like us poor people ever stopped being poor.”
At the polls this fall, Stuchi was far from alone.
Milei shocked the country when he topped Argentina’s two main political forces in primary elections in August. Now, he’s defeated Sergio Massa, a left-wing establishment candidate, in a runoff election. According to provisional results, he won about 55 percent of the vote. A main fount of that support is, surprisingly, young people — and young men in particular.
Ahead of a previous round of voting in October, polls indicated almost 50 percent of voters 29 and younger backed Milei, the wild-haired outsider and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who inveighs against traditional politicians, branding them as members of a “caste” that must be done away with. (His campaign slogan, “que se vayan todos,” or “get rid of them all,” carries echoes of the Trumpian “drain the swamp.”) A win by Milei’s ascendant campaign in Argentina in some ways serves as yet another indicator of the far right’s rise across the Americas and around the world. But young voters’ support sets Milei apart from the far-right stars he is often compared with, including Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both of whom were shut out by young voters in their recent reelection bids.
With over 100 percent inflation crushing Argentine pocketbooks, Milei’s proposed solution is a radical plan to abolish the central bank and dollarize the economy by replacing the Argentine peso with the US dollar — a move untested by countries of Argentina’s scale. He has voiced support for other extreme positions, including liberalizing gun ownership and individuals’ freedom to sell their organs. He denies human-caused climate change and opposes abortion. At rallies, he can often be seen wielding a chainsaw, symbolizing his plan to slash public spending and unravel Argentina’s generous safety nets. In Milei’s view, the state should largely limit itself to homeland security: To that end, he has pledged to axe the ministries of education; environment; and women, gender, and diversity, among others.”
“In survey after survey, large majorities of respondents say both that the economy is terrible and that Biden is doing a bad job managing it. For months, American economists and policy wonks have expressed puzzlement about these results, pointing to strong GDP growth, low unemployment, the lack of a recession in the US, and cooling inflation rates.
But after a two-year period featuring the highest inflation in decades, prices are still a whole lot higher than they were four years ago — and voters seem not to have forgiven that just yet. (This has been a global phenomenon, worse in Europe than in the US, that could be dragging down many incumbents.) And governments’ chief inflation-fighting tool, high interest rates, may also be painful to many people, making it harder to get credit. Stock markets have stagnated or fallen since early 2022 (after many years of continuous upward expansion in the US). Some Americans could also see their incomes taking a hit due to the expiration of generous pandemic aid.”
“What can Biden tell the electorate about Trump that they do not already know? That he’s a serial liar? That he stands indicted in a series of criminal cases? That he commits business fraud the way others inhale and exhale? That he has spent a lifetime stiffing employees, contractors, lawyers? That he paid off a porn actress? That he recklessly mishandled sensitive government documents? All of this is a matter of public record, let alone the pesky detail of his desperate efforts to retain power by essentially overthrowing his own government.
Again, if The New York Times polling is correct, a plurality of American voters have absorbed all this and prefer him to the president. They have, as the financial world says, “priced” Trump’s behavior into their choice and as of now, have not considered the behavior disqualifying.
In some sense, this has been true for eight years, certainly in the Republican Party. The fact that four of the previous five GOP presidential nominees refused to endorse him in 2016 did not make a difference — Trump received a bigger share of Republican votes than Romney did. The fact that so many of Trump’s own key appointees — secretary of Defense, secretary of State, attorney general, national security adviser — all regard him as a threat to our political system has made no difference to Trump’s commanding lead for the GOP nomination.
So when a separate New York Times poll shows that a criminal conviction would significantly damage Trump, take that with a grain or a handful of salt. For eight years, he has survived conduct that would have swept a politician into oblivion.
It is true that the public’s judgment may turn as the prospect of a second Trump administration draws closer; it may be that the stories of what Trump plans for a second term — retribution against his political opponents, the obliteration of the guardrails that restrained his worst impulses, the staffing of a government with toadies who when asked to jump, will ask, “How high, sir?” — will change enough minds to give Biden (assuming he’s on the ballot) a second term.
It’s also true, however, that the task this unpopular president faces is a whole lot tougher than what the last successful incumbent presidents faced. And if a troubled incumbent can’t define an opponent effectively? Well, just ask Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford or George H.W. Bush what happened.”
““This is a very weighty decision. All of us have prayed for God’s discernment. I know I’ve prayed for each of you individually,” Johnson said at the meeting, according to a record of his comments obtained by POLITICO, before urging his fellow Republicans to join him in opposing the results.
A review of the chaotic weeks between Trump’s defeat at the polls on Nov. 3, 2020, and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack shows that Johnson led the way in shaping legal arguments that became gospel among GOP lawmakers who sought to derail Biden’s path to the White House — even after all but the most extreme options had elapsed.
As Trump’s legal challenges faltered, Johnson consistently spread a singular message: It’s not over yet. And when Texas filed a last-ditch lawsuit against four states on Dec. 8, 2020, seeking to invalidate their presidential election results and throw out millions of ballots, Johnson quickly revealed he would be helming an effort to support it with a brief signed by members of Congress.
Throughout that period, Johnson was routinely in touch with Trump, even more so than many of his more recognizable colleagues.
Some of Johnson’s vocal opponents at the Jan. 5, 2021, closed-door meeting were Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who warned Johnson’s plan would lead to a constitutional and political catastrophe.
“Let us not turn the last firewall for liberty we have remaining on its head in a bit of populist rage for political expediency,” Roy said at the time, according to the record.
Nearly three years later, on Wednesday afternoon, Roy and Bacon cast two of the unanimous House GOP votes to make Johnson the next speaker.”
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“Johnson then ran through a litany of allegations of election law changes in key states that he said were unconstitutional — and then he lent credence to a discredited claim of election fraud: “The allegation about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with the software by Dominion — look, there’s a lot of merit to that.”
In the same interview, Johnson — who as speaker will be privy to the nation’s most sensitive intelligence secrets — returned to the Dominion matter. He embraced the false description of Dominion machines as “a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.”
When the hosts pressed Johnson on Trump’s losses in court, the Louisianan noted that there were still a dozen suits pending but it was an “uphill climb.” Later that day, House Republicans elected Johnson as the vice chair of the GOP conference.
When Johnson joined the effort to support Texas’ fight at the Supreme Court, he said Trump had been in touch with him yet again.
“President Trump called me this morning to let me know how much he appreciates the amicus brief we are filing on behalf of Members of Congress,” Johnson tweeted the next day.”
“Democrats did well.
Gov. Andy Beshear (D) won reelection in deep-red Kentucky. Democrats seemed set to hold onto the Virginia state Senate and take over the Virginia state House, blocking Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hopes of passing conservative policies (and perhaps his ambitions in national politics). Meanwhile, Ohio voters enshrined the protection of abortion rights in the state constitution and legalized recreational cannabis.
Strangely, all this happened while President Joe Biden has been getting some of his worst polling numbers yet. As in the 2022 midterms, though, national dissatisfaction with Biden did not lead to a red wave sweeping out Democrats across the country or to wins for conservative policy proposals in ballot initiatives.”
“”Unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world,” said Reagan, calling the ability to attract newcomers “one of the most important sources of America’s greatness.” Immigrants help ensure that the U.S. remains “a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier,” he continued. “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
It was the last speech he delivered as president and it was, as some have called it, a “love letter to immigrants.” And though he made no distinction between “legal” and “illegal,” Reagan was broadly willing to treat immigrants with humanity.
“Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit?” he said during the 1980 Republican primary debate. Four years later, during a presidential debate with Democratic candidate Walter Mondale, he explained, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Reagan would follow through on that statement by signing an amnesty bill into law in 1986. Any immigrant who entered the U.S. prior to 1982 was made eligible for a pathway to citizenship, ultimately extending amnesty to nearly 3 million immigrants.”
“They’re more conservative than other Republicans. More likely to be men. Less likely to have graduated from college.
And they’re way more confident they’ve made up their minds, even though the first primary or caucus is still four months away.
That’s the coalition former President Donald Trump has assembled in asserting his dominance over the Republican presidential primary.”