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    It isn’t ‘anti-democratic’ to bar Trump from office. It’s needed to protect democracy | Steven Greenhouse

    Over the decades, several US supreme court justices have warned that the US constitution is not a suicide pact – in other words, that the constitution shouldn’t be interpreted in ways that jeopardize the survival of our nation and our democracy.Right now, however, I worry that the supreme court’s rightwing supermajority, in its anticipated rush to prohibit states from kicking Donald Trump off the ballot, will turn the constitution into a suicide pact. By letting an insurrectionist like Trump remain on the ballot – a man who spurned centuries of constitutional tradition by refusing to peacefully turn over the reins of power to the man who defeated him – the supreme court would be putting out a welcome mat to a candidate who has made no secret of his plans to trample all over the constitution and trash our democratic traditions.Many legal experts worry that the rightwing justices will focus on the wrong issue when the high court takes up the historic Colorado case about whether a state can kick Trump off the ballot – a case in which the court might also decide whether Trump should be disqualified from the ballot in all 50 states.When the court considers that case, the six conservative justices might focus on their concerns about infuriating rightwing voters, their political soulmates, if they rule that the constitution requires that Trump be disqualified as an insurrectionist. The justices will also no doubt worry that they’ll be seen as taking a high-handed, anti-democratic step if they deny voters the opportunity to vote for Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee.But the justices’ job is not to worry about angering the Maga crowd. Their job is to focus on enforcing the text of the constitution and, along with it, preserving our democracy. An insurrectionist candidate who stands a good chance of winning the presidency in November could drive a stake through the heart of America’s democracy.The Colorado case centers on the 14th amendment, a post-civil war measure that aimed to ensure all citizens – especially formerly enslaved people – the equal protection of the law. Section 3 of that amendment aimed to bar supporters of the Confederacy who had rebelled against the United States and its constitution from holding office: “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”One can’t honestly deny that Trump promoted and aided an insurrection. He unarguably gave “aid or comfort” to the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was essentially a coup attempt that sought to prevent the rightfully elected president, Joe Biden, from taking office. In disqualifying Trump, the Colorado supreme court wrote: “The record amply established that the events of January 6 constituted a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the US government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish the peaceful transfer of power in this country. Under any viable definition, this constituted an insurrection.”The House select committee on January 6 provided a mountain of evidence showing that Trump had planned and backed that insurrection. Trump not only “summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6”, the committee established, but also urged them to march to the Capitol to “take back” the country. Even as rioters stormed the Capitol and assaulted the police, Trump tweeted messages that whipped up the violent crowd’s animus against the then vice-president, Mike Pence.Trump, the committee wrote, also “refused repeated requests over a multiple-hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol”. Trump also refused to call in the national guard or any federal law enforcement to stop the assault on the Capitol.The Court’s job is to uphold and enforce the Constitution without fear or favor, and it shouldn’t be cowed by anyone, not by Trump’s supporters and certainly not by Trump, who dangerously warned of “big, big trouble” if the justices rule against him in this case.Constitutional scholars say the Supreme Court might engage in some legal legerdemain and search for some escape clause to keep Trump on the ballot and prohibit states from disqualifying him. Some scholars predict the justices will rule that Trump must first be convicted in court as an insurrectionist before he can be disqualified – even though many supporters of the Confederacy were disqualified from holding office without being convicted in court and even though Section 3 says nothing about requiring convictions.Some constitutional experts contend that Section 3 doesn’t apply to presidents and that Trump therefore shouldn’t be disqualified under it. Section 3 specifically mentions disqualifying Senators and House members, but it doesn’t mention the presidency. But that’s undoubtedly because Section 3’s authors never dreamed that a past insurrectionist would ever be running for president. There can’t be any doubt that Section 3’s authors would have insisted on disqualifying Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, if he had become a candidate for the presidency of the United States.If the supreme court’s six rightwing justices allow Trump to stay on the ballot, they can do so only by turning their backs on the methods of constitutional interpretation that they have repeatedly trumpeted: textualism and originalism. Not only is the text of Section 3 crystal clear about barring insurrectionists, but the Radical Republicans who wrote the 14th amendment would have been repulsed by the idea of letting an insurrectionist like Trump run for the highest office of the land.Trump of course complains that the push to disqualify him is a leftist plot. But the two constitutional scholars who led the way in arguing that Trump should be disqualified – William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen – are highly regarded conservative members of the Federalist Society. Moreover, one of the jurists most respected by conservatives, former federal judge J Michael Luttig, has lauded the Colorado supreme court’s decision as “unassailable”.In decades past, the US supreme court did not shrink from issuing decisions that offended and angered millions of Americans, whether it was enraging many white southerners by barring school segregation in Brown v Board of Education, or infuriating millions of women by overturning Roe v Wade, or angering a wide swath of Democrats by cutting short the vote count to deliver victory to George W Bush over Al Gore. In the Colorado disqualification case, the justices should not shrink from angering Trump supporters. The justices should do what they’ve taken an oath to do: enforce the letter of the law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNotwithstanding what Trump’s defenders say, those who seek to disqualify Trump are not suppressing democracy. They are seeking to enforce the constitution’s clear language against the nation’s most prominent insurrectionist. The person who is seeking to suppress democracy is Trump (along with many of his Maga supporters).Trump was anti-democratic in seeking to overturn Biden’s legitimate, 51-47% victory in 2020. Trump was anti-democratic when he called for terminating the constitution. Trump has threatened to be a dictator on day one, and someone who threatens to be dictator on his first day in office might not stop there.Moreover, whenever Trump loses – for instance, when he lost the 2016 Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz – he claims that he was cheated and demands that legitimate democratic results be discarded. Trump’s philosophy is to accept election results only when he wins and never when he loses. What can be more anti-democratic than that? That anti-democratic philosophy fueled the January 6 insurrection.There’s no denying that on a certain level it would be anti-democratic to bar a popular candidate like Trump from the ballot, and, yes, that could stir up an ugly and perhaps violent and illegal response from the Maga crowd. Yet let’s not forget that much of the constitution is anti-democratic and counter-majoritarian; it, for instance, prohibits a majority of lawmakers from restricting your freedom of speech or your freedom to practice your religion.Those who warn that it would be anti-democratic to kick Trump off the ballot should realize that Trump’s election as president would be a far graver and longer-lasting risk to our democracy. This is a man who has talked of being a dictator, of terminating the constitution, of using his second presidential term to exact vengeance against his enemies and critics. This is a man who even floated the idea of executing Mark Milley, the general who was chairman of Trump’s joint chiefs of staff.If the supreme court lets Trump remain on the ballot, history may remember John Roberts and company as the court that gave a bright green light to the election of an insurrectionist who would end our democracy as we know it.For the nine justices, the bottom line should be not only that Trump was an insurrectionist, but that Trump has loudly signaled that if he’s elected to a second term, he will trample all over our constitutional and democratic norms. If the justices interpret the constitution to let insurrectionist Trump remain on the ballot, the Roberts court may be taking a giant, highly regrettable step toward turning our constitution into a suicide pact for our democracy.
    Steven Greenhouse is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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    US supreme court allows Idaho’s strict abortion ban to stand pending hearing

    The US supreme court on Friday allowed Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, while a legal fight continues.The justices said they would hear arguments in April and put on hold a lower court ruling that had blocked the Idaho law in hospital emergencies, based on a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration.Hospitals that receive Medicare funds are required by a federal law to provide emergency care, potentially including abortion, no matter if there’s a state law banning abortion, the administration argued.The legal fight followed the court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and allow states to severely restrict or ban abortion. The Joe Biden White House issued guidance about the law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act – or Emtala – two weeks after the high court ruling in 2022. The Democratic administration sued Idaho a month later.US district judge B Lynn Winmill in Idaho agreed with the administration. But in a separate case in Texas, a judge sided with the state.Idaho makes it a crime with a prison term of up to five years for anyone who performs or assists in an abortion.But the administration argues Emtala requires healthcare providers to perform abortions for emergency room patients when needed to treat an emergency medical condition, even if doing so might conflict with a state’s abortion restrictions.Those conditions include severe bleeding, pre-eclampsia and certain pregnancy-related infections.“For certain medical emergencies, abortion care is the necessary stabilizing treatment,” the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, wrote in an administration filing at the supreme court.The state argued that the administration was misusing a law intended to prevent hospitals from dumping patients and imposing “a federal abortion mandate” on states. “[Emtala] says nothing about abortion,” Idaho’s attorney general, Raul Labrador, told the court in a brief.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust on Tuesday, the federal appeals court in New Orleans came to the same conclusion as Labrador. A three-judge panel ruled that the administration cannot use Emtala to require hospitals in Texas to provide abortions for women whose lives are at risk due to pregnancy. Two of the three judges are appointees of Donald Trump, and the other was appointed by another Republican president, George W Bush.The appeals court affirmed a ruling by US district judge James Wesley Hendrix, also a Trump appointee. Hendrix wrote that adopting the Biden administration’s view would force physicians to place the health of the pregnant person over that of the fetus or embryo even though Emtala “is silent as to abortion”.After Winmill, an appointee of Democratic president Bill Clinton, issued his ruling, Idaho lawmakers won an order allowing the law to be fully enforced from an all-Republican, Trump-appointed panel of the ninth US circuit court of appeals. But a larger contingent of ninth circuit judges threw out the panel’s ruling and set arguments in the case for late January. More

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    More Americans are stockpiling abortion pills without pregnancy – study

    More Americans are now stockpiling abortion pills in case they get pregnant, according to new research published Tuesday.Before Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, Aid Access, an organization that mails abortion pills to people across the US, received an average of 25 requests a day from people seeking the pills despite not being pregnant. After the leak of the supreme court decision to overturn Roe, that average shot up to 247 requests each day, the research published on Tuesday found.That number fell after the actual decision, but rose again to 172 a day in April 2023, as US courts signaled a willingness to restrict the availability of a major abortion pill.People have been turning to Aid Access for “advance provision” pills since September 2021, after Texas enacted a six-week abortion ban but long before the US supreme court overturned Roe and abolished the national right to abortion. Now, with wide swathes of the US south and midwest under abortion bans, an online market to request and obtain abortion pills is thriving.The study tracks requests between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of April 2023. In December 2023, the US supreme court announced that it would hear arguments in a case regarding the future of mifepristone, a major abortion pill. That case is expected to be decided by this summer.In total, over the study’s time frame, Aid Access tracked roughly 48,400 advance provision requests. It received more requests for advance provision pills from states that were anticipated to enact bans – even more than the requests from states that did enact bans.“It seems to suggest that what people are reacting to is the threat of reduced access, the threat of curtailment of reproductive rights,” said Dr Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study. “When you think about what advanced provision is, that makes sense, right? Advanced provision is getting out ahead of things. Advanced provision is advanced planning. Advanced provision is a way to protect a potential need you might have in the future if you think access to the service that would fulfill that need is going away.”Over the study period, Aid Access also received more than 147,00 requests from people seeking to end their existing pregnancies. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to “self-manage” your own abortion, or perform an abortion outside of the formal US healthcare system, using pills within the first trimester of pregnancy.Compared with the people who wanted to terminate their existing pregnancies, people who sought advance provision pills were more likely to be white, child-free and living in urban areas. Choosing from a list of reasons, they most frequently told Aid Access that they wanted the pills to “ensure personal health and choice” and to “prepare for possible abortion restrictions”.Aid Access was launched in 2018 by Dr Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician and one of the most visible abortion providers in the world. Gomperts, who co-authored the study published Tuesday, previously founded Women on Web, an organization that, like Aid Access, shipped abortion pills. However, Women on Web didn’t provide pills to the United States. Ultimately, Gomperts decided that the state of abortion access in the country was too dire to ignore.Advance provision pills cost $150 and should arrive within a few days of ordering, according to Aid Access’s website. During the time frame of the study, most of the pills were being shipped by overseas pharmacies, Aiken said.Now, to send abortion pills, US-based physicians associated with Aid Access have begun to rely on what are known as “shield laws”: protections in Democratic states for abortion providers who prescribe pills for patients in abortion-hostile states. This transition to focusing on using US providers was part of the reason for the study’s conclusion in April, Aiken said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It made sense to look at a time period where the service was entirely outside of the formal US healthcare setting,” Aiken said. “Now, I think a lot of people would argue that it’s happening within the formal healthcare setting, because it’s US provider-led and -based.”But while the US providers in blue states may be operating with the formal healthcare system, their patients in red states are not necessarily afforded the system’s protections and guidance. Someone who wants to get a check-up after an abortion, or even just talk to their doctor about their experience, may not feel able to.“In terms of the experience of the person actually using the pills, it may still look a lot more like a self-managed abortion,” Aiken said. “What that means for the nature of the service is an ongoing, interesting question that we’re thinking about now in the research field.”There was not much data available on what people ended up doing with the advance provision pills, Aiken said, since only a fraction followed up with Aid Access. However, of that fraction, most people still had the pills on standby months later.Last year, Gompertstold the Guardian that she wanted people to stock up on pills to protect themselves.“Don’t wait for the decision. Just get the medication now, get it in your house, get it in your hands,” she said. “If you’re in a war zone and the war is coming, you also make sure you have enough food in your house. This is how it feels. It really is a war. It’s a war on women.” More

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    Joe Biden hails Sandra Day O’Connor as ‘American pioneer’ in eulogy

    Joe Biden hailed Sandra Day O’Connor as an “American pioneer” who embodied principle over politics in his eulogy at the Washington funeral of the US supreme court’s first female justice.The president praised O’Connor for breaking down barriers in the legal and political worlds, transcending political divisions and weighing ordinary people in her decision-making in pointed remarks that contrasted sharply with his words about the current supreme court.“She was especially conscious of the law’s real impact on people’s lives,” he said. “One need not agree with all her decisions in order to recognize that her principles were deeply held and of the highest order and that her desire for civility was genuine.“O’Connor knew that “no person is an island” and that Americans – “rugged individualists, adventurers and entrepreneurs” – were inextricably linked, he said at the service in Washington National Cathedral.“And for America to thrive, Americans must see themselves not as enemies, but as partners in the great work of deciding our collective destiny,” Biden said.Tributes to O’Connor, who died on 1 December aged 93, were also delivered by chief justice John Roberts and O’Connor’s son Jay O’Connor.Sandra Day O’Connor died in Phoenix, Arizona, of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness.A centrist on the court who was appointed by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1981, O’Connor served until her retirement in 2006.She created a critical alliance in 1992 to affirm the central holding in Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide. She also was a crucial vote in 2003 to uphold campus affirmative action policies that were used to increase the number of underrepresented minority students at American colleges.The supreme court, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority, overturned the Roe ruling in 2022 and in June struck down race-conscious admissions programs in higher education, effectively prohibiting affirmative action.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden has said the current supreme court has done more to “unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history” but has rejected calls to expand it.Chief justice Roberts called her a “strong, influential and iconic jurist”.Jay O’Connor spoke of his mother as an indefatigable woman with “unearthly energy” who kept working long after she hung up her judicial robes.“We thank you, we love you, we will never, ever forget you.” More

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    ‘I miss my name’: Giuliani verdict lays bare limits of defamation law

    About halfway down the main hallway in the federal courthouse in Washington DC are the names of every judge who has sat on the bench since the early 1800s. Printed in gold lettering, the names include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Antonin Scalia and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom have gone on to the highest levels of public service.But this week, four floors above that hallway, in courtroom 26A, two little-known public servants mourned the moment they lost their own names.In harrowing detail, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye Moss testified about how Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump falsely accused them of election fraud and ruined their lives shortly after the 2020 election as part of a scheme to contest and overturn the results. They told eight Washington DC jurors how they received a flood of racist messages and death threats. And how they’ve fled their homes outside Atlanta, Georgia, isolated themselves from their community and started protecting their identities. “I don’t have a name no more,” Freeman said on Wednesday. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”As millions of Americans have heard by now, Giuliani, the former New York mayor, repeatedly lied about the two women, who are Black. He claimed that they wheeled suitcases of illegal ballots out from under tables after counting had concluded at State Farm Arena, that they were passing around USB drives and that they created a fake water main break.The case was one of several significant efforts to hold Giuliani, Trump and other allies accountable for the lies they spread about the 2020 election – an election Trump continues to insist that he won.The jury awarded Moss and Freeman $148.1m in cumulative damages.The Giuliani case was about more than defamation. It was about power.At issue in the case wasn’t really the fact that Giuliani lied, but whom he lied about. It was a case about the way powerful people can use their influence to destroy the reputations of the average person.Moss spoke about this during her testimony on Tuesday when she described a nightmare she continues to have. In it, she opens her front door, she said, and finds powerful people with nooses ready to kill her.“They could do that because of who they are,” Moss said. “I’m a nobody.”Giuliani showed little emotion or remorse as lawyers for Freeman and Moss played horrific messages they received, including voicemails filled with racial slurs and letters sent to their homes with graphic death threats.In the first moments of the case, Von DuBose, one of the attorneys for Freeman and Moss, asked the jurors to consider the power of a name. “What’s in a name? Power, purpose, pride,” he said. “Your name is the most important thing you know.”He went on to say that the case was about how the names of Freeman and Moss have been transformed by Giuliani’s defamatory lies. Unspoken, too, were those of two men who have built their careers around their names: Giuliani and Trump. Two men who have continued to benefit as Moss and Freeman suffered.Though they never intended it, Moss and Freeman have become symbols of the human cost of the cost of election denialism because of that imbalance of power.They have largely stayed out of public since 2020, but their presence in a Washington DC courtroom served as a stand-in for the droves of election workers who have faced lies and harassment from people who believe the election was stolen. Many of them have left the profession.That sentiment was driven home in a gut-wrenching moment when Moss testified about the initial weeks in December 2020 when she went back to work, even while receiving harassment, to prepared for Georgia’s January 2021 runoff election. “I literally felt like someone was going to come and attempt to hang me and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”“Amidst all of this my goal was to get ready for the next election,” she said. “It’s hurtful … That’s the way people feel when I’m breaking my back to make sure their vote counts.”Usually in high-profile cases, it is the wealthy, famous person who is surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers in the courtroom. But in 26A this week, Giuliani sat alone at the defense table, flicking through his tablet, with a single lawyer, Joseph Sibley.Sibley did his best, with scattershot arguments to the jury to try to persuade them that Giuliani was not responsible for serious harm against the plaintiffs. He pointed to other actors, such as the far-right platform Gateway Pundit, that he said were really to blame for Freeman and Moss’s suffering because of how they disseminated the lies and videos. It would not really cost tens of millions of dollars to repair the reputation of the two women, he argued at another point.At the end, he made a simpler appeal: judge Giuliani by his good reputation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Rudy Giuliani is a good man. I know that some of you may not think that. He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days,” he said. “The idea of him being a racist, or him encouraging racist activity, that’s really a low blow. That’s not who he is.”At the plaintiffs’ table, about 10ft away, it was Moss and Freeman who sat quietly surrounded by a dozen attorneys. It was the first time the two women had come face to face with the man who has tormented them for years.“After everything they went through, they stood up and they said no more. They opened themselves up to you and the public, and unlike some other people, they testified here under oath,” Michael Gottlieb, one of their attorneys, said in closing arguments, needling Giuliani’s last-minute decision not to testify.He urged the jurors to “send a message” with their damages award.“Send it to Mr Giuliani,” the lawyer said in his closing argument. “Send it to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”The verdict came, and it sent a message. But it didn’t yet bring closure.It’s not clear when Moss and Freeman can expect to see a cent of the money they’ve been awarded. Giuliani is widely reported to have financial troubles and he is likely to use an appeal and every other legal maneuver to try to delay paying. And it’s not clear whether the case will even stop Giuliani from defaming them again.“I don’t regret a damn thing,” he said outside the federal courthouse on Friday.Giuliani had been far from repentant throughout the week. And since August, when Judge Beryl Howell entered a default judgment against Giuliani for defamation per se, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy, Giuliani has made at least 20 defamatory statements against Freeman and Moss, their attorneys said this week.The dynamic underscores the limits of defamation law to police misinformation. While it can force people to pay for their lies, it cannot force them to stop lying or persuade people not to believe the lies.RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah, said observers are concerned about instances in which defamers brush aside damages. In cases involving large media outlets, she said, it may simply be seen as the cost of doing business. And in others, like that of Giuliani, people may simply “be judgment-proof, bankrupt, or otherwise unwilling or unable to pay”, she said.“In both situations, we’re testing the outer boundaries of libel law’s ability to remedy the harm done by falsehoods and to deter defamers from telling future lies. We are also, more fundamentally, testing the rule of law,” she added.“If the incentive to lie to audiences eager to receive those lies is stronger than the power of any court proceeding, and if defamers have decided that they simply will not participate in cases brought against them and will avoid paying damages when they are issued, this raises far deeper concerns.”Even with the money, it won’t be able to undo the damage that the two women suffered to their reputations. Moss loved her job as a Fulton county election official and thought her interim position as the permanent absentee ballot supervisor would be made permanent.Instead, she was moved to a back office role under the impression she would never touch a ballot again.“I want people to understand this: money will never solve all of my problems. I can never move back to the house I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go, and who I choose to share my name with,” Freeman said outside the federal courthouse in Washington DC after the verdict on Friday.“I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.” More

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    New York judge suspends Trump gag order in fraud trial, citing free speech

    A New York appeals court judge on Thursday paused a gag order that barred Donald Trump from commenting on court staffers in his civil fraud trial. The trial judge had imposed the gag order last month and later fined Trump $15,000 for violations after the former president made a disparaging social media post about a court clerk.In his decision, Judge David Friedman of the state’s intermediate appeals court cited constitutional concerns about restricting Trump’s free speech. He issued a stay of the gag order, allowing Trump to comment freely about court staff while a longer appeals process plays out.Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against the trial judge, Arthur Engoron, late on Wednesday challenging the gag order as an abuse of power. Friedman scheduled an emergency hearing for Thursday afternoon around a conference table in a state appellate courthouse a couple of miles from where the trial is unfolding.Trump’s lawyers had asked the appeals judge to scrap the gag order and fines imposed by the trial judge, after the former president and his attorneys claimed that a law clerk was wielding improper influence.Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly put the law clerk, Allison Greenfield, under a microscope during the trial. They contend that the former Democratic judicial candidate is a partisan voice in Judge Engoron’s ear – though he also is a Democrat – and that she is playing too big a role in the case involving the former Republican president.Engoron has responded by defending Greenfield’s role in the courtroom, ordering participants in the trial not to comment on court staffers and fining Trump a total of $15,000 for what the judge deemed violations. Engoron went on last week to prohibit attorneys in the case from commenting on “confidential communications” between him and his staff.Trump’s lawyers – who, separately, sought a mistrial on Wednesday – contend that Engoron’s orders are unconstitutionally suppressing free speech, and not just any free speech.“This constitutional protection is at its apogee where the speech in question is core political speech, made by the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, regarding perceived partisanship and bias at a trial where he is subject to hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and the threatened prohibition of his lawful business activities in the state,” they wrote in a legal filing. More

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    The US supreme court’s new ‘ethics code’ is an embarrassment | Moira Donegan

    One of the unspoken rules of the US supreme court is that the justices will never admit that they were wrong, and no one else is allowed to admit it, either.Last week, in oral arguments in United States v Rahimi – which asks whether it is constitutional to take guns away from men who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders – the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, had to dance around this rule very delicately as she represented the federal government. The federal law disarming abusers had been thrown into question by a ludicrous and dangerous test for all gun restrictions that the supreme court instituted in its 2022 Bruen decision, one which makes it difficult to impose new gun laws if those laws aren’t sufficiently similar to ones on the books from either the revolutionary or civil war eras.It’s a ridiculous test, one that is self-evidently not workable. But Prelogar couldn’t say that; instead, she said that lower courts had simply misinterpreted the court’s perfect test, making mistakes of methodology; that the prospect that domestic abusers could be rearmed, leading to the murders of thousands of American women, was not a result of the court’s reckless, short-sighted and self-interested decision making, but a result of other people’s mistakes. She asked them not to clean up their mess, but to “clarify” their thinking.Something similar to Prelogar’s solicitous fiction about the justices’ infallibility was evident in the justices’ own missive, issued on Monday, declaring that the court would adopt a code of conduct. On the surface, this looked like a positive step. The supreme court has come under fire in recent months for its justices’ flagrant abuses of their station: their familiarity with billionaires who shower them with gifts and vacations; their lavish lifestyles and magically disappearing debts; their willingness to appear at fundraisers for political groups, and reluctance to recuse themselves from cases involving their family members, friends or financial interests.But none of this was a real problem, the justices assured us. These concerns, they claim in a statement accompanying their new code of conduct, were not legitimate, and certainly not the product of any actual mistakes or nefariousness on the justices’ part. Rather, they were merely the result of the failure of the silly, misinformed and stupid public to understand that the court, in its mighty wisdom, is already perfectly ethical.“The absence of a Code,” the justices wrote, “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” However did Americans get that impression?It is meaningful that the justices issued this code of conduct; it means that the public pressure on the court – which has been the subject of outrage and disgust since its 2022 Dobbs decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, and which has subsequently come under increased scrutiny for its indifference to either the appearance or the reality of conflicts of interests – is working.The justices often make it clear that they read their own press, but they do not often deign to make any changes to their actual behavior, or to try to discipline their own institution. More often than not, they suggest that such gestures would be beneath them. Not so with the code of conduct, which signals that the justices admit that there is at least some obligation they have to the American people. As the legal commentator Chris Geidner put it, “They have acknowledged that the public rightfully has expectations that they will behave in an ethical way.” It’s better than nothing.But not much better. The new code of conduct, the justices assure us, is merely a formalization of guidelines to which they already adhered, a claim which on its own raises doubts about the code’s sufficiency. The code is based on a binding code of conduct that is applied to judges on the lower courts – but significantly weakened in its application to the supreme court justices.The commanding word “shall” that characterizes the lower courts’ code of conduct is softened throughout, in the supreme court version, to “should”. Prohibitions on corruption are dotted with exonerating qualifiers, like Swiss cheese. Where the lower courts’ code says judges shall not “lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance the private interests of the Justice or others” or “convey or permit others to convey that they are in a special position to influence the Justice”, the supreme court modifies this influence-peddling prohibition with a loophole big enough to drive Clarence Thomas’s RV through: the modifier “knowingly”.This kind of softening edit appears throughout the code: its strained language and convoluted application of exceptions seems like the product of vociferous intra-court infighting, or the lobbying of certain justices to ensure that their own questionable ongoing conduct can be excepted from the code. This might be the code’s one silver lining: its language seems evidence of chaos, disagreement and discord on the court, reminding us that even though we are stuck with this conservative supermajority, they are also stuck with each other.Even this weakened and exception-ridden code, it should be noted, has no enforcement mechanism. There is no way to investigate whether a justice has broken the code, no way to adjudicate the question of his or her wrongdoing, and no way to discipline him or her for any violation. The question of how to interpret the code, how to abide by it, and what to do in the event that it is broken is left entirely to the justices themselves – just like all their ethical questions were before.This response to questions about the court’s ethics with a defiant insistence that they will only ever police themselves is consistent with the way the justices have responded in the past. This is, after all, the same court that has refused to cooperate with congressional oversight of its own ethical misdeeds and appearance of corruption just this year, with the chief justice, John Roberts, issuing a contemptuous refusal to appear before the Senate judiciary committee in April. Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, opined to the Wall Street Journal this summer that Congress had no right to impose oversight or regulation on the court – that the justices and their power are immune from the principles of checks and balances.A belief that the court is its own sole and highest authority was also evident the last time the justices tried to explain away their own misconduct, when they issued a “Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices”. Like this code of conduct, that statement, published just this past April, also had no enforcement mechanism; like this one, it seemed more designed to quell public outrage about the court than to meaningfully circumscribe the justices’ behavior. No one fell for it that time, either.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Searching for the perfect republic: Eric Foner on the 14th amendment – and if it might stop Trump

    The 14th amendment was passed in 1868, to settle important matters arising from the civil war, including how we define equality before the law. Ever since, it has served as the foundation for one landmark supreme court decision after another, from Brown v Board of Education (1954), which banned segregation in public schools, to Obergefell v Hodges (2015), which legalized gay marriage.In recent times, a little-known feature has come into sharp focus. Six days after the January 6 Capitol attack, Eric Foner, a historian of the US civil war and the Reconstruction era, argued that section 3 of the amendment forbids an “officer of the United States” from holding office if he or she has sworn an oath to the constitution, then participated in an “insurrection or rebellion”.That could mean Donald Trump is ineligible to hold public office.The matter is now before the states. In September, New Hampshire’s secretary of state refused to intervene. On 8 November, Minnesota’s supreme court rejected an attempt to prevent Trump from running. On 14 November, a judge in Michigan dismissed a lawsuit that tried to exclude Trump. But other states will be reckoning with the issue in the weeks ahead, including Colorado.To better understand the origin of the 14th amendment, and its ongoing relevance to 2024, Foner sat down with Ted Widmer, another civil war historian. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.Ted Widmer: The 14th amendment has been in the news a lot lately. Can you remind us why this particular amendment holds so much sway?Eric Foner: The 14th amendment is the most important amendment added to the constitution since the Bill of Rights in 1791. It’s an attempt by the victorious north, the Republican party in the aftermath of the civil war, to put its understanding of that war into the constitution.It is also the longest amendment. They tried to deal with everything that was on the political agenda in 1865, 1866. It deals with many specific issues, such as ensuring that southern enslavers are not going to get monetary compensation. Or that – and this is in the news today – that if you take an oath of allegiance to the constitution, and then you engage in insurrection, you are barred from holding political office in the United States.On the other hand, the 14th amendment also contains the first section, which is a series of principles arising from the end of slavery, beginning with birthright citizenship, that all persons born in the US are automatically citizens of the US. Although there’s an exclusion of Native Americans, who are still at that point considered citizens of their tribal nation, not the US. Also in the first section, “equal protection of the law”, that no state can deny to any person, not just citizens, the equal protections of the law – this was a fundamental change in American politics and society.Can you elaborate?No state gave Black people full equality before the law before the Reconstruction era and the 14th amendment. What equal protection actually means in practice is certainly open to debate. And it has been debated ever since 1868, when the amendment was ratified. There are key supreme court decisions over the last century – whether it’s outlawing racial segregation, establishing the right to terminate a pregnancy, “one man, one vote”, and many others – [that] have rested on the 14th amendment. My basic point is this: to borrow a modern phrase, I think the 14th amendment should be seen as a form of “regime change”. It’s an attempt to change the regime in the United States. It’s not a minor little change in the political system. It’s to change a pro-slavery regime, which is what we had before the civil war, to one based on equality, regardless of race. A fundamental change.This is what the civil war has accomplished. It has destroyed slavery, and it has created a new political system, which views all persons in the US as entitled to some modicum of equality.What is the immediate context of the passage of the 14th amendment? What were they trying to address?Well, the immediate context was what we call the Reconstruction era, the period immediately after the civil war, when the country was trying to come to terms with the consequences of the war, the most important of which were the destruction of slavery and the unity of the nation. As I mentioned, there were specific issues, which really have very little bearing on our political life today, although they keep popping up. For example, part of the 14th amendment says the government has to pay its debt: if it borrows money, selling bonds, it has to pay them off when they become due. This lay there pretty much unremarked for a long time. But lately with the debates over the debt ceiling, it’s back in the news again.But the fundamental issue was: what was going to be the status of the 4 million former slaves, who were now free citizens? Were they going to enjoy equality, were they going to have the right to vote, which was critical in a democracy? Were they going to be able to hold public office? What about economic equality, would they enjoy anything like that? The 14th amendment tries to deal with that in various ways. There are five sections, all of them relate back and forth to each other.Even though Abraham Lincoln was no longer alive, does it reflect his thinking?A constitutional amendment is the only legislative measure in which the president has no role whatsoever. The president cannot veto a constitutional amendment the way he can veto a piece of normal legislation. In fact, when the 13th amendment was passed, irrevocably abolishing slavery in the US, Lincoln worked to get it ratified, and he signed a copy of it as a symbol of his support. He got a handwritten copy of the 13th amendment, approved by Congress, and he signed it, whereupon Congress said, “You can’t sign this, President Lincoln, because the president has no role in the passage of the amendment. You’re trampling on our powers.”Didn’t know that.Yeah, they got annoyed when he signed it. Signing it didn’t make it legal or illegal. It becomes part of the constitution when it’s ratified by Congress and by a sufficient number of states.But the point is, Lincoln was a mainstream Republican. He was a great man, a brilliant writer and speaker, but he was also a party man. And the 14th amendment was approved by almost every Republican in Congress. There is no question Lincoln would have approved it. Also, Lincoln did not get into big fights with Congress the way some presidents have. So I think the basic principle, equality before the law, Lincoln had come to approve that during the civil war. He didn’t really hold that view before the civil war. But there’s no question in my mind that if Lincoln had not been assassinated, and was still president, he would have happily urged Congress to support the 14th amendment.Is birthright citizenship a uniquely American concept?Well, that is another complex and important issue and something that is back on the political agenda today. Is it uniquely American? No, it’s not. There are other countries that also automatically make you a citizen.But the point of birthright citizenship is it’s very important in the constitution to have this. It’s basically a statement that anybody can be a citizen. We are not a country based on a single religion, we are not a country based on a single political outlook, we are not a country with an official sort of set of doctrines that you have to adhere to. We’re not a country with an ethnic identity. A person of German ancestry born in Russia could automatically be a citizen of Germany, just by that ethnic identity. But the child of a guest worker, born in Germany, is not automatically a citizen of Germany.So birthright citizenship is an important consequence of the civil war. And of course, it had been deeply debated before then. Just before the civil war, in 1857, the supreme court in the Dred Scott decision ruled that no Black person could be a citizen. There were half a million free Black people. They were born in the US, most of them, and they could never be a citizen.The first section of the 14th amendment abrogates the Dred Scott decision, and creates a national standard for who is a citizen. The original constitution mentioned citizens, but it didn’t say who exactly they are, or what are the qualifications for being a citizen. So this clears up an ambiguity of the constitution and establishes a basic principle, equality, as fundamental to American life.Does that mean between Dred Scott in 1857 and the 14th amendment in 1868 that African Americans, even if they had liberated themselves and fought in the union army, were not citizens?Well, the Republican party and Lincoln had repudiated the Dred Scott decision on paper. Even as early as 1862, the attorney general, Edward Bates, issued a ruling saying Dred Scott was wrong.But what you said is true, it’s the 14th amendment that creates Black citizenship as a constitutional principle. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 established it in national law. By then 200,000 Black men had fought in the civil war. They were almost universally considered to be citizens. If you would fight and die for the nation, they’re not going to say after the war, “You can’t be a citizen.”Dred Scott destroyed the reputation of the supreme court in the north. During the secession crisis, nobody said, “Let’s let the supreme court decide this.”Unlike the Declaration of Independence, or the constitution, whose signers are well known, the 14th amendment is more anonymous. Who were the principal authors?It was written by the joint committee on Reconstruction, a 15-member body set up by Congress to figure out what laws and constitutional amendments were necessary to enforce the verdict of the civil war.My book The Second Founding begins by saying exactly what your question says. People have heard of James Madison, “father of the constitution”. They have heard of Alexander Hamilton, for reasons we know nowadays. These are people who were critical in writing the constitution.But who remembers John Bingham, the congressman from Ohio, who was more responsible than anyone else for the first section of the 14th amendment, about the federal government having the power to prevent states from denying Americans equality? We don’t remember Thaddeus Stevens, the great radical Republican from Pennsylvania who was the floor leader in the House, who did more than anyone else to get the 14th amendment ratified. We don’t remember James Howard, from Michigan, who got it through the Senate. In other words, the 14th amendment is not seen as fundamental to our constitutional system, whereas, of course, the original constitution is.So what I say in my book is, we’ve got to think of these people as like the founding fathers. This was a refounding of the nation, and the people who were critical in that deserve to be remembered.Were there parts that could have been written more clearly?The writing was in two modes. One was very clear. If you loaned money to the Confederacy, it’s never going to be repaid. That’s a highly specific point. But the language of the first section of the 14th amendment is much more ambiguous or general. Equal protection of the law. All citizens are entitled to due process of law. People cannot be denied life, liberty and property without due process of law.The language might have been clearer. But John Bingham wanted it to be ambiguous. What issues relating to the political equality of race relations would get on to the national agenda in the next 10, 50 or 100 years? He wanted to have a general set of principles which could be applied when necessary, and in fact, the fifth section, the final section of the 14th amendment, specifically states, “Congress shall have the power to enforce” this amendment. What does it mean to enforce the equal protection of the law? Well, that’s for the courts and the Congress and others to decide. So the language could have been clearer, but I’m not sure it would have been better if it were clearer. They wanted it to be ambiguous to leave room for future action.In other words, they thought this was not the end of Reconstruction. This was just one step toward creating what Thaddeus Stevens called “the perfect republic”, which they wanted to build on the ashes of slavery.Love that phrase.That’s Stevens’ speech, before the House. You know, the 14th amendment was a compromise. There were radical Republicans, conservative Republicans, moderate Republicans. And they hammered out a series of compromises. But Stevens, who was a real radical, also knew when you had to compromise. In his final speech before Congress, before the 14th amendment was ratified, he said, “Yeah, I had always hoped that when we could get out from under the power of slavery, we could create this perfect republic that the founders tried to, but failed to, because they allowed slavery.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut that dream has vanished, he said. The perfect republic is never really achieved, in any human endeavor. So, yeah, that’s what they were trying to do. Erase the mistakes of the founders, when it came to slavery, and remake the republic.Could the 14th amendment have passed if Congress had not taken a strong stand against seating southerners?The passage of the 14th amendment is interesting. Immediately after the civil war, Congress said, “We’re not letting the southern states back in quite yet.” They cannot vote on whether to ratify the three Reconstruction amendments. So the vote in Congress was only among northerners. If the south had had all the congressmen it normally did, the 14th amendment would never have been ratified. You need a two-thirds vote in Congress, and three-quarters of the states. It’s a very high bar to amend the constitution.But another aspect of this is, could it have passed the states? When the 14th amendment is first passed by Congress, President Andrew Johnson’s plan of Reconstruction is still in effect. Johnson had set up all-white racist governments in the south. They were still in power. And they all voted not to ratify the 14th amendment, every one of the southern states except Tennessee. They did not want Congress establishing this principle of equality for Black Americans.Congress got so infuriated that in 1867, they abolished those governments. They said, “We are going to give Black men the right to vote.” They hadn’t done that at the beginning of Reconstruction. They’re going to set up new state governments in the south, and those governments are going to ratify the 14th amendment. They ordered them to ratify it. And the way they guaranteed it was to allow Black men to vote. New governments were set up, biracial governments. For the first time in American history, Black and white men were sitting in legislatures, voting on laws, holding public office. This was a radical change in American democracy. And with those new governments, in which Black people for the first time had a voice, the southern states ratified the 14th amendment. So how the 14th amendment was ratified is irregular compared to most other amendments.Why was section 3 added?Section 3 is one part of the amendment that has been almost completely ignored until the last couple of years. It doesn’t apply to all southern whites, or even most of them, but to anyone who held an office before the civil war, who took an oath of allegiance to the constitution. That would mean people who served in the military or held some kind of public office. Even a postmaster has to take an oath to the constitution. The purpose was to eliminate the old ruling class of the south from public office. It was to create a space where new governments could come into being which would approve of the principles of the 14th amendment. They did not deny the right to vote to ex-Confederate leaders. But they did deny the right to hold office.It was almost never enforced. There are only a few examples of this amendment being enforced during Reconstruction. A couple of local officials were disqualified from office because they had held an office before the civil war then served in the Confederate army. In other words, they gave aid to insurrection after having pledged allegiance to the constitution. I think there were a couple in Tennessee. But basically, Congress gave an amnesty after a few years to just about everybody that this covered.And in the first world war, a socialist member of Congress, Victor Berger, was convicted under the Espionage Act. If you criticized the American participation, you could be put in jail. Congress expelled him under the third clause of the 14th amendment. In other words, he pledged allegiance to the constitution and was now convicted of what they called espionage. It wasn’t actually spying, it was really just opposing the war. But then the supreme court overturned the conviction and Congress let him back in.In the last year or two, this has become a major issue in relation to Donald Trump. Depending on how you analyze it, Trump took an oath to support the constitution – obviously, when he was sworn in as president – but gave aid to insurrection. If you consider the events of 6 January 2021 an insurrection. He tried to overturn a governmental process, tried to prevent the legitimate election of a president.There have been lawsuits in a number of states to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024. Thus far, none has succeeded. Some are pending. A couple of cases have come up about lesser officials who took part in the events of January 6. And in fact, a guy in New Mexico, a county commissioner, was ordered out of office by a court on the grounds that he was barred by the third section of the 14th amendment.A congressman in North Carolina, Madison Cawthorn, faced claims that he could not serve. It became moot because he lost his primary. But there was a court that did say that it was a legitimate question whether he could serve if elected, because he had been there taking part in the events of January 6.So it’s on the agenda now. But there is no jurisprudence really related to section 3. Nobody knows what the supreme court would say. Some people say you would need a judicial ruling. How do you know that a guy participated? It’s like you’re convicting him without a trial. But on the other hand, others say, no, this is just a qualification for office. This is not a criminal trial.Being barred from office is not a criminal punishment. It’s one of the qualifications for office. For example, let’s say somebody was elected president who was under the age of 35. The constitution says you have to be 35. Let’s say Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected president. Not likely, but she’s a well-known figure in politics. Well, she couldn’t serve because she’s under 35. And a court or somebody would just have to say, “I’m sorry, you don’t meet the qualifications here.” I am not a law professor. Neither I nor anyone else knows what the courts would decide. But in actuality the 14th amendment says it’s Congress that enforces the 14th amendment, not the supreme court. They didn’t want the court involved because of Dred Scott.The final section of the amendment says, “Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment by appropriate legislation.” Would Congress have to declare somebody having participated in insurrection? I don’t know. But this was brought up including by me about two years ago, in the op-ed, in the Washington Post, after the insurrection of January 6.There was an effort to impeach President Trump, but it didn’t succeed. But I pointed out you don’t need impeachment, which requires a two-thirds vote to convict in the Senate. If you really want to keep Trump out of office because of his actions on January 6, you could do it through the third section of the 14th amendment.Certainly, regarding a president, there is no precedent. But the third section has never been repealed. So there it is.Did the 1872 Amnesty Act supersede section 3?That’s been brought up. The 14th amendment also says Congress can eliminate this punishment or disability by a two-thirds vote. In 1872, in the run-up to the presidential election of that year, Congress did pass a general Amnesty Act, which saved almost all prominent Confederates.Now, some people say that eliminated section 3, and therefore it can’t be enforced. But that’s not the case. You can let people off from one punishment, but it didn’t say this section is no longer applicable. It said that a whole lot of people would no longer be punished as part of an effort to bring about sectional reconciliation. The Amnesty Act doesn’t necessarily repeal a previous measure unless it says the previous measure is automatically repealed.How has section 3 been interpreted since Reconstruction?It has barely been interpreted. There have been only a handful of cases. There’s almost no jurisprudence related to it, which is one of the reasons Congress has been reluctant to enforce it. Joe Biden has said he doesn’t really want to get into this. It would guarantee a prolonged legal battle if you tried to enforce section 3 against Trump. Enforcing it against the county commissioner in New Mexico probably didn’t raise a lot of animosity. But it has happened. So there is a bit of jurisprudence, but not enough that a court could easily say, “Here’s the precedent, this is what we’ve done in the past.”Is the president “an officer of the United States”?Again, because there’s no jurisprudence, it hasn’t been decided. A couple of prominent conservative law professors wrote an article saying section 3 is on the books and can be enforced. Then they changed their mind. And they said the president is not an officer of the United States. So it does apply to all sorts of other offices. But not the president.This has never been exactly determined, but it certainly seems the normal understanding of the term “officer” is someone holding office. The president certainly holds office. When the constitution was ratified, there was no president. The previous constitution, the Articles of Confederation, didn’t have a president. There was no executive officer. It was only the Congress. So it’s unclear. They added the president as someone who could execute the laws. But I don’t see how you can eliminate the president or exclude the president from this language. If you take the whole of section 3, I think it’s pretty clear that they are trying to keep out of office anybody who committed the acts that section 3 describes. But again, it’s complicated.Did the events of January 6 constitute “an insurrection or rebellion against the constitution”?They certainly tried to a halt a constitutional procedure, the counting of the electoral votes. One of the more bizarre parts of our constitution, actually, but nonetheless, it’s there.What is your definition of insurrection or rebellion? You know, this gets into a question we actually haven’t talked about, which is very important in relation to the 14th amendment, which is the notion that you can clearly ascertain the original meaning, or the original intention of a law or a constitutional provision or something like that, and that the constitution should be interpreted according to the original meaning of the people who wrote the provision, or the original intention.This notion that you can ascertain, clearly, the original intention is absolutely absurd. No important document in history has one intention, or one meaning. Particularly the 14th amendment, it was written with compromises, with 8-7 votes in the joint committee. It was ratified by hundreds of members of state legislatures. Who can tell us exactly what the intention is? It is a legitimate historical question to ask, what were they trying to accomplish? But that’s a little different than saying what was their intention, at least in the legal realm.Yes, historians are always trying to figure out, why did they write and ratify the 14th amendment? In a way, that’s an intention question.But to answer that question, unfortunately, justices have a way of going purely to debates in Congress. They do not look at the general historical context. The meaning of the 14th amendment was debated and argued and fought out at all levels of society.One of my favorite quotations from this period comes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great advocate of women’s rights. She said, during Reconstruction, I’m paraphrasing, “The basic principles of our government were debated at every level of society, in Congress, in the pulpits, in schools, at every fireside.” I love that. In other words, even in their homes, people are debating the issues around the 14th amendment. There is no one single intent that you can locate in that gigantic discussion about constitutional issues, which accompanied the ratification of the 14th amendment. So I think, as most historians would say, it’s a pointless test to try to identify one single intention.Wouldn’t the legal challenges take longer than the election itself?Yes, the legal challenges would take a long time, and it would be weird if Trump is elected next fall, then a year into his term of office he’s evicted because he doesn’t meet the qualifications. We saw how Trump reacted to actually losing an election. But now, if he won and then was kicked out of office, that would certainly be a red flag in front of a bull.
    Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, is a Pulitzer prize-winning author whose most recent book is The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
    Ted Widmer is a distinguished lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, and a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton. His most recent book is Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington More