The justices, wanting to restore Trump to the ballot, didn’t address the underlying question of if he incited an insurrection
Elena Kagan once referred to Jonathan Mitchell sarcastically as “some genius”. That was in oral arguments surrounding SB8, the bounty-hunter abortion ban that Texas succeeded in passing before the overturn of Roe v Wade, which Mitchell wrote, pioneering a cockamamie scheme for evading judicial review.
Mitchell, a far-right lawyer currently vying for a spot in the second Trump administration, is a fan of this kind of bald, legal bad faith: you can’t quite call him duplicitous, because he never quite pretends that the law really leads him to the conclusions he’d like to reach. He’s more about coming up with novel legal schemes to get to his desired outcome and trusting that the federal judiciary, captured as it is by Federalist Society acolytes and wingnut cranks, will go along with him because they share his political proclivities.
That’s what worked for him with SB8: the supreme court allowed Texas’s abortion ban to go into effect long before Dobbs: not because Mitchell made a convincing argument, but because he offered them an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway.
Something similar happened in Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v Anderson, a question about whether Donald Trump is disqualified from holding federal office under section three of the 14th amendment.
Colorado didn’t declare every state is required to take it off. It decided to take his name off their ballot. I don’t get the argument. It’s true if enough states do it it has a national outcome but so what? That is deciding it nationally. States decide how to run their own elections, I don’t know why states rights aren’t being claimed here given how popular that move usually is lol.
I was being a little facetious, I just wanted to show how her argument was wrong based on Bush v. Gore alone, which was decided by the judicial body she is now a member of, but yeah, there are a lot of reasons why it’s wrong.