Law (US)

Imagine it is 6 January 2025. The bell tolls for the day of electoral college certification again. All the events of 2024 converge:The US supreme court’s likely ruling in Trump v Anderson denying Colorado’s disqualification of Trump under the constitution’s 14th amendment, section 3; the exoneration of Joe Biden by special counsel Robert Hur for handling documents while sideswiping him as near senile; the ruling on Trump’s immunity; the trial for his coup attempt; and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s defiance of federal court rulings in deploying his national guard to the border, supported by other Republican governors who have mobilized their guard units in similar acts of nullification – all these happenings could hurtle to a convulsive confrontation.The supreme court was precisely cautioned against fostering “potentially disastrous turmoil” if it were to rule against Colorado, in an amicus brief submitted by Benjamin Ginsberg, who for decades was the leading Republican party attorney on elections, along with two prominent legal scholars, Richard Hasen, professor at the UCLA law school, and Edward Foley, professor at the Ohio State University law school.The brief by Ginsberg et al was unvarnished: “A decision from this court leaving unresolved the question of Donald Trump’s qualification to hold the office of president of the United States under section 3 of the 14th amendment until after the 2024 election would risk catastrophic political instability, chance disenfranchising millions of voters, and raise the possibility of public violence before, on, and after November 5 2024.”The brief added that “the grounds for avoiding the merits are not credible: Colorado manifestly had the authority to determine Mr Trump’s legal qualification for the office he seeks, and this court has jurisdiction to review that federal-law decision on its merits. To punt on the merits would invite chaos while risking great damage to the court’s reputation and to the Nation as a whole.”But apparently the justices failed to read this brief, just as they apparently failed to read the various amicus briefs filed by distinguished historians.Picture how the scenario might unfold as though reading it as a history from the vantage point of one year from now. The Ginsberg brief predicts the dire consequences that would flow from the supreme court ruling against Colorado. If we layer on to that prophesy the seemingly disparate events of this winter of our discontent we can see, through a mixture of fact and speculation, a disastrous unraveling.Start with the supreme court ruling that a state is not the proper body to determine a disqualification under the 14th amendment, section 3. That would, as the Ginsberg brief states, leave enforcement inevitably, by a process of elimination, to the Congress. The justices’ frantic effort to escape responsibility for upholding the plain language of the 14th amendment in the name of saving the country from a hypothetical political crisis would potentially create a very real constitutional one.In that light, the election result might prove irrelevant. The reason is that now, according to this scenario, the 119th Congress, sworn in on 3 January 2025, could reject the electors from states for Trump by deciding that he is an insurrectionist. The supreme court would have set the stage. If the Democrats were to win the House, they could remove Trump. If the Republicans win control of the Senate, the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refusing to whip the vote for Trump, could allow a number of Republican senators to vote for Trump’s disqualification, which would void his electoral votes by both chambers.If there is a deadlock, the Ginsberg brief argues, the House still would have an option to remove Trump. Under the Electoral Vote Reform Act, the House would establish rules under the constitution’s 12th amendment in which each state delegation gets one vote in the House. But before that would have taken place, the House could vote that Trump is excluded from a 12th amendment ballot because he was disqualified under the 14th amendment, section 3. No one not on the ballot for president could be substituted. Which means that Joe Biden would be re-elected in any case.All along, throughout the entire campaign year, that would mean that Trump has never been qualified. And it would also mean that only the supreme court decision against Colorado made it seem that he was.In the hearing of the Colorado case earlier this month, Chief Justice John Roberts cast aside the pretense of the conservative doctrines of originalism and textualism on which the supreme court has eviscerated voting rights, gun control and abortion rights. He retreated into a political hypothetical that if the court ruled in Colorado’s favor Biden might be subject to attempts to remove him from the ballot as an insurrectionist.Roberts prattled, “… maybe they’ve got a stack of papers saying here’s why I think this person is guilty of insurrection, it’s not a big insurrection, something that, you know, happened down – down the street, but they say this is still an insurrection … I don’t know what the standard is for when it arises to that.”Led by Roberts, the justices refused to define an insurrection, which was the heart of the Colorado supreme court’s ruling. Roberts’ hypothetical, besides tossing overboard originalism, was more than supercilious punditry. Perhaps his scenario was based on his familiarity with the tactics of the right wing.But Roberts also inadvertently revealed an implicit contempt for the federal system of justice. If a ludicrous suit were ever to be filed against Biden claiming he was an insurrectionist, it would enter into the process of that state’s courts. Roberts apparently had scant confidence in the state courts, up to their supreme courts, to render a sensible decision to throw out transparently mischievous cases. And if a silly case somehow made it to the supreme court, Roberts himself could lead it to deny certiorari. But in his eagerness to find some cause to rule against Colorado, Roberts may have suffered a memory lapse about the fundamental workings of the judicial system.With a supreme court ruling against Colorado, Trump would hail it as a major political victory, brandishing it as proof that all of the charges against him were motivated by partisanship.Now, imagine that in the 2024 election Biden wins the popular vote for the presidency by millions. That is not such a difficulty. Only one Democrat since 1992 has lost the popular vote in a presidential election.But consider that Biden’s overall vote and vote in swing states might be hurt by a lingering ill wind from the special counsel’s report, blowing in suspicion that, despite his command of foreign policy, military affairs and congressional negotiations, he is too damn old, unlike his unsympathetic, malicious, despised and also elderly opponent.If that report imprinted the notion that Biden’s age reflected disability, then wavering voters could fail to grant Biden the credit for his accomplishments, instead giving more weight to the image of him as incapacitated, leaving the record of his presidency unexplained. Trump’s malignant rants, meanwhile, would be, as they are often now, either accepted or dismissed.Cognitive dissonance, rather than cognitive function, in the election could prove to be the critical factor. The president who lifted the country out of Trump’s massive economic and social fiasco in the Covid crisis, and steered it through the resulting inflation to a fabled soft landing, would be perceived as having little to do with his own purpose and therefore weak. On the economy, it’s the stupidity, stupid.The cognitive disconnect in failing to attribute results to Biden’s actions would have enormous political consequences. The more Biden would try to explain the benefits of his policies, the more the Maga base and suggestible voters would disbelieve him because they have already decided he was too old to do anything, a perception reinforced not only by Fox News but also by the drumbeat of mainstream and social media.The election would then disclose the tenacity of the primitive mind. Trump’s bluster would be equated with strength and his threats with energy. The more bellicose he behaves, the more he would be seen as strong; the more incoherently he babbles, the more his supporters believe he knows what he was talking about. While Biden’s irrelevant gaffes have so far been held against him, Trump’s stream of semiconsciousness has been credited as a sign of vigor. The primitive mind that instinctively associates ape-like bellowing with power will not be swayed.Special counsel Robert Hur’s report on the storage of documents at the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s home, published earlier this month, underscored the negative campaign attack. The report’s first line was that “no criminal charges are warranted”. This was followed by contradictory assertions that Biden “willfully retained” documents and that “reasonable jurors” would conclude “that he did not retain them willfully”, and that “he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully – that is, with intent to break the law – as the statute requires”.Having exonerated Biden, the special counsel added this snark: “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”The press attention to the latter part of the sentence has almost always left out the first part – the conjecture of a trial. Yet, as Hur made clear in the opening of his report, he had already decided that he would not bring charges because he lacked evidence, much less a single witness he could bring before a grand jury. When Hur wrote the line he knew there could be no trial.In Biden, Hur had a president “willfully” dedicated to cooperation. He appeared for a deposition at the White House for more than five crucial hours on 8 and 9 October, immediately after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, in which he was immersed in urgent national security meetings and conversations with world leaders. There was no appearance of obstruction of justice or perjury, as there was in the documents case against Trump. Instead, Biden was willing to elevate the legal process over affairs of state.Biden’s quoted statements that appeared muddled are completely familiar to anyone who has ever had a discussion with him. I have personally had long conversations with Biden since I met him nearly 40 years ago. He has a habit of ruminating, wandering and voicing fragments of thought aloud, but always returns to his subject with considerable knowledge, experience and clear views. (I know of many people who have had conversations with Biden very recently, who report that he is focused, sharp and has a cogent grasp of the many crises he is handling at once.)Hur’s elaborately cute description of a doddering Biden was not gratuitous; it was carefully crafted. Hur knowingly lent the imprimatur of a Department of Justice report to character assassination. Then, Attorney General Merrick Garland naively released it unredacted to the public – red meat for the jackal pack.What was Robert Hur’s state of mind? The most generous interpretation of the special counsel’s innuendo may have been that he was innocent of any experience with a charming Irish American politician. The irony was surely lost on the hardwired conservative that his description of Biden fit Ronald Reagan to a T. But Hur instrumentally deployed his summary of his encounter with Biden as an excuse for his lack of evidence.Hur is a cold-blooded Javert as rightwing careerist. He is a representative man of the first generation bred entirely within the hothouse of the Federalist Society from his start to his smear. Beginning as a summer intern in 2000 at Kirkland & Ellis, where he had the model of partner Brett Kavanaugh, he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist in the period when he was issuing opinions blocking abortion clinics from using Rico to sue anti-abortion protesters for damages, in Scheidler v National Organization for Women, and striking down affirmative action to increase racial diversity in college admissions, in Grutter v Bollinger and Gratz v Bollinger.Hur was an associate to then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who defended then attorney general William Barr’s misrepresentation of a redacted version of the Mueller report on Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016 to assist Trump. Trump appointed Hur the US attorney for Maryland, which certainly met with the approval of the Federalist Society chair, Leonard Leo. Hur has been a featured speaker at Federalist Society events since 2007.Hur’s report was not obsessional or fanatical, but professional. It was in effect his job application for the next Republican administration.Now, imagine, if the scenario of the Ginsberg brief is a catastrophe foretold, that all these events tumble unpredictably to 6 January 2025 and beyond. One of the analytic tools of historical understanding is to speculate on what might have happened if events took unexpected twists and turns. The proverb “for want of a nail” suggests that the absence of a minor factor produced a major outcome. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect describes the impact of seemingly random occurrences that set in motion a chain reaction leading to enormous change – the flapping of a butterfly’s wings that results in a distant tornado. A supreme court ruling and a special counsel’s report are more than a nail and a butterfly’s wings.So, consider the possible effects in a not-so-distant future:Disqualified by the Congress, an enraged Trump files a suit before the supreme court. But that is just a gesture. After the 2020 election, he incited a mob to attack the Capitol. Suppose that now he calls on the Texas governor – and other Republican governors – to send national guard units to enforce his “election”. Biden federalizes them, but the Republican governors proclaim that he has usurped power to keep himself in office illegitimately and that Trump is the truly elected president.Self-installed as the president of the de facto Second Confederacy, Trump’s first act is to pardon himself of all federal crimes. He has called Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Benjamin Netanyahu to request that they recognize him as the true president. Putin offers him asylum.As armies prepare to clash on a darkling plain, Trump’s last-ditch appeal in the Manhattan election fraud case for paying hush money to a porn star goes against him. The New York appellate court announces it has upheld his prison sentence and fine. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida responds that while Trump might be the president he will honor the extradition clause of the constitution to deliver him from Mar-a-Lago as a fugitive from justice. Trump flees to Texas, where Governor Abbott refuses the extradition order. Trump proclaims he is president wherever he is.The case for remanding Trump to jail in New York then goes to the supreme court. Having decided that the 14th amendment, section 3, is not self-executing, that a state cannot enforce it, the justices must now decide whether to uphold a district attorney under a state law to seize a convicted criminal under the extradition clause, which has always been pro forma. The court puts the case on its calendar several months in the future in the spring of 2025. Its conservative members are at the moment on an extended Federalist Society retreat at a private luxury lodge in Wyoming paid for by Harlan Crow.Or we click the heels of the ruby slippers. “There’s no place like home.” We awake from a phantasmagorical dream in a bed surrounded by Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.
Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist. He is a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More