It’s heartening that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the rest of the Supreme Court to unanimously rule that states can’t kick ex-President Donald Trump off their ballots via a ridiculous reading of the 14th Amendment.
It shows that whatever partisan divisions there may be on the court, it’s ruled by a fair reading of the law. And the law in this case was being abused.
Anything less than a 9-0 ruling would’ve given the left license to pretend it lost because its “conservative” majority was playing politics.
None of this is to excuse Trump’s behavior around the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot; it’s to say that it’s not up to state officials to decide, without any real due process, that he thereby “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” and so is disqualified from future office, as Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled in December.
Those judges should be ashamed, along with the Maine and Illinois officials who followed suit, as well as all involved in dozens of similar cases in other states.
Basic legal issues (such as the fact that no one’s convicted Trump of anything like “insurrection”) aside, allowing this would license similar games without end, for a downward spiral that would make every presidential election a farce.
As the court put it: “Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.”
It’s damning of current liberal discourse that the “14th Amendment strategy” survived so long, ignoring the exhaustive critiques of the likes of regular Post contributor Jonathan Turley.
It got you tons of clicks from the vast universe of Trump-haters, and lots of airtime on MSNBC and CNN: Apparently, that’s all that mattered.
Which also means that, had the court’s liberal wing played along with this nonsense, the same shameless commentariat would’ve greeted a 6-3 ruling as proof that this is a “MAGA court” (even though it ruled against Trump repeatedly in his litigation over the 2020 vote) that can only be fixed by a court-packing scheme that would also endanger our constitutional democracy.
Yes, Sotomayor, Kagan and Brown Jackson dissented on an irrelevant part of the ruling, but as Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted in her own opinion on the same issue, “For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”
It’s also a message for all who don’t want Trump returned to office: Stop reaching for legal gimmicks, and focus on beating him at the polls.
You keep claiming to believe in democracy — start acting that way.