• Nougat
    link
    fedilink
    579 months ago

    They steered clear of it because SCOTUS is not a fact-finding court. That fact finding was already handled by Colorado courts. Trump did engage in insurrection.

    SCOTUS answers questions of law, not questions of fact. In this case, it seems that they all came to the oral arguments looking for a way to justify what they already wanted to do: keep Trump on the ballot. There are a few justifications they may employ. (For the record, I think all of these are stupid, but I am not a Supreme Court Justice.)

    • Section Three disqualifies an insurrectionist from holding office, not from running for office. (So if one wins the election, then what? This only kicks the can and makes it harder to address later on. It’s a gamble that the insurrectionist will lose the election.)
    • The President is not an “officer.” (This is absolute nonsense, but there’s a suggestion that it might go there.)
    • Individual states should not be allowed to have a sort of “veto power” over presidential candidates. (There is already a patchwork quilt of procedures and qualifications for ballot access, and the Constitution grants States the sole power to manage federal elections.)

    SCOTUS is going to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling barring Trump from the Republican primary ballot in that state, even though no federal entity has any authority over elections. What of Maine, then? Will the SCOTUS ruling mention or otherwise impact the Maine decision (which is itself still working its way through the Maine court system)? What about the other states that have challenges to Trump’s qualification still pending? A problem that I see is that if the court finds that States do not have the right to disqualify candidates based on Section Three, it would seem that States also do not have the right to disqualify candidates based on age, natural born citizenship, or any other reason. Hell, a tortoise should run. Nowhere in the consitution does it say that non-human candidates are disqualified.

    I frankly don’t understand this court’s obvious desire to order that Section Three be ignored for this candidate. I do see that a problem with Section Three is that it is written to be self-executing, but that it hinges on slightly subjective definitions of “insurrection” and “aid or comfort.” This court’s ruling will clarify that, but it will do it wrong.

    • @SkybreakerEngineer
      link
      English
      209 months ago

      Tell that to “racism isn’t real anymore” and “infinite money in elections couldn’t possibly cause harm” and so many more. This court loves basing conclusions in “fact” when it suits them.