Feelings...Nothing More Than Feelings...
Contrary to what Morris Albert sang in 1975, Section III of the 14th Amendment is based on more than feelings.
I've been fighting the first of my semiannual bouts of insomnia this week, so I used some of that awake time to catch up on some podcasts.
Last night, I was listening to Megyn Kelly's podcast - she had on lawyers Mike Davis and Dave Aronberg discussing the Democrats' lawfare against President Trump. Davis is a Republican and a frequent contributor on Fox News, Aronberg is the Democrat State Attorney for Palm Beach County and is often on MSNBC.
When the conversation turned to Dems kicking Trump off the ballot, it centered around the fact we have discussed around the FB water cooler, that it would seem for the 14th Amendment to be used to exclude Trump, an actual insurrection would need to be determined and declared.
Davis held to that point. He was noting, as we have, nobody has been charged with insurrection, much less convicted of it, so it would seem the rally turned riot did not meet the legal definition of "insurrection". He noted that both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine SecState used information (not necessarily evidence) from the partisan J6 House committee in their arguments to claim Trump was an "insurrectionist" and that Trump was completely denied due process in that process. Davis held that there was no insurrection because no insurrection has been proven through the courts.
Unsurprisingly, Aronberg took slightly different approach. He noted there was a pretty good case that Trump's due process rights were violated but as a matter of law, it was not necessary to prove insurrection, that the process of "we all know an insurrection happened" of the teenage uptalking Maine SecState was good enough. He was stating that the 14th was "self executing", meaning that it didn't rely on another legal entity to state there was an insurrection. In other words, it is enough for Shenna "Cher Horowitz" Bellows ((from the movie "Clueless"), a state officer with no law degree and a lifelong history of left wing activism, to decide on her own that what Trump did was insurrection-y.
By the way, according to sources, Cher attended Middlebury College, graduating magna cum laude in 1997 with highest honors for her thesis on economic and environmental sustainability. I wonder if her thesis was based in fact or a bunch of left wing twaddle - I'm betting the latter.
But I digress. Back to our regularly scheduled program.
Aronberg argued that was just peachy because that's how they roll in Maine and SCOTUS could sort it out.
Davis argued that was stupid, that it allowed Democrat office holders to exercise the power of the state to ban anyone based on politically motivated personal feelings rather than as a matter of fact or law. He pointed out that SCOTUS will have to get involved or there could be 50 different decisions of eligibility in national elections.
This was just another debate between left and right where the left argued for emotional reasoning unfounded in law and the right argued for grounding in actual proof and a reasoned determination in a court, one based in law.
One wonders if SCOTUS is going to be able to shed its fear of another Bush v. Gore (which in my opinion is why they entirely avoided getting involved in the 2020 election) and in the process, end about 75% of this political circus masquerading as sober prosecution and adjudication.
I don't think they can avoid this one by citing a "lack of standing".
If Blue states are allowed to kick candidates off ballots based on their feelings, national elections will be delegitimized at worst or at best, thrown into the House for determination of a winner.
Either is a total politization of the electoral process (elections, of course, are political, but the means and methods of conducting them should never be), through simply not allowing people who support a disfavored candidate to have their voices heard at the ballot box.
Another serious risk is that the GOP will knuckle under to the Democrat demand for “proportional” allocation of EC votes based on popular vote tallies in the states - if all candidates are allowed on the ballot. Sure sounds like the kind of decision the GOP tends to get frightened into.
Remember there has been a growing push from the left for a national popular vote in presidential elections. That would end the protections designed into the Electoral College and the big cities across America would elect every president from now on. There would be no need for Kansas or either of the Dakotas to vote because New York and California would guarantee Democrats would win every time.
If we have learned anything, it is that Democrats simply do not care how much destruction they leave in their wake as they prosecute their jihad against one man, Donald J. Trump.
The real question is whether there is anyone left in the three branches of American government who has the spine to stop them.
Funny how the pseudo-epistemic verb “Ah feel . . .” Is so close to the adjective “awful!”
... 'is there is anyone left in the three branches of American government who has a spine ?'