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.
The Constitution is 100% clear on the issue. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a dickhead. Everyone knows he’s disqualified. But this illegitimate Supreme Court is going to just fucking ignore the incredibly clear wording of that specific part of The Constitution. They consistently danced around the heart of the case, insurrection, so they could weasel some bullshit decision. Roe v Wade all over again. These Republican fucks have said they’d prefer a Republican dictatorship over a democratically elected alternative. Fucking traitors. Thomas does not even have the integrity to recuse based on his insurrectionist asshole wife. Fuck them all, and fuck anyone who supports these jackasses.
Not only that, but the question “Why should Colorado decide for everyone?” is also complete bullshit. Anyone who asks it is either a moron or a liar. Colorado has not decided for everyone. Colorado has decided for Colorado, and has every right to do so. It would be unconstitutional to prevent Colorado from determining who is elligible to be on their ballots.
This entire court is illegitimate.
It’s not even the general ballot they kept him off of, it’s the primary ballot, but when has this court ever let facts get in the way of their decisions?