United States Politics and Government

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong

      by

      It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences” argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, 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. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s January: Court Dates and Election Nights

      by

      In the political world, Donald J. Trump is on the cusp of something that eluded him in 2016: a clear victory in the Iowa caucuses this month. His advisers hope it will be the first in a series of early state victories that propel him to collect enough delegates to be the presumptive Republican presidential nominee by late March.In the legal world, however, the former president is at the same time facing two trials this month that hit on a deeply personal level. One is the wrap-up of the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against him and his company and an expected decision from the judge on the penalties he must pay. The other is the damages trial for defaming E. Jean Carroll, a New York writer who said he raped her in a New York department store in the 1990s. A jury last year said he had sexually abused her.It is a juxtaposition that Mr. Trump has so far managed to his advantage on the campaign trail, casting himself as the victim of political and legal persecution by a Democratic establishment out to silence him and his supporters. In both trials, he could face substantial financial penalties and a significant change in how — or if, in a worst-case scenario for him — he continues to control his business.If Mr. Trump has helped himself in court with his methods, it has been hard to discern so far, given how the judges have engaged with him and his arguments. Yet, in the face of this political-legal collision, he considers himself his own best defender and communicator, and in 2024, what the court of Republican public opinion will tolerate is different from what a court of law will allow.Mr. Trump is among the most disciplined undisciplined political figures in modern U.S. history: For all his self-inflicted wounds in his public comments and erratic social media posts, he is fairly rigid in delivering a repetitive message of grievance and victimization to his followers. He is aiming to turn undesirable circumstances that he’s furious about into a kind of high-stakes drama that he can direct as he and his campaign navigate a thicket of legal proceedings in the coming months.Mr. Trump, who attended much of the civil fraud trial, said on Tuesday that he planned to attend that trial’s final stage as well as the Carroll trial.That will have him flying back and forth from New York to Iowa and New Hampshire to juggle days of planned campaign events. He is also making plans to attend next week’s federal appeals court arguments in Washington on his claims that he should have presidential immunity in his federal election fraud trial, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.It’s a court appearance that promises to be a unique media spectacle in the nation’s capital, and will fall just days after the anniversary of Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob swarmed the Capitol building during certification of his 2020 election loss.While Mr. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different jurisdictions, the case in which he and his company have been found to have committed decades-long fraud is taking place more immediately, and cuts to the heart of his business brand. That case, overseen by Justice Arthur Engoron, and the one brought by Ms. Carroll have enraged him for months, according to people who have spoken with him.Mr. Trump entering a courtroom after a break in his civil fraud trial at the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan last December.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesMr. Trump, who contacted The New York Times after learning an article was being written about the legal actions unfolding in January alongside the first rounds of voting, described the cases in a phone interview as “unfair.”He criticized the judges in both trials, describing Judge Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who is overseeing the Carroll case, as “more radical” than Justice Engoron, who issued a partial summary judgment against Mr. Trump before the trial began, leaving just a half-dozen claims left to be ruled on, along with penalties. Mr. Trump again highlighted comments the attorney general made targeting him during her 2018 campaign for her post.He also said there was a case scheduled just before “every election.” The federal trial he faces on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States is set to start on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday, although it is widely expected to be delayed.The former president said he planned to attend the remaining day of closing arguments in the case before Justice Engoron, and said he wanted to testify in the Carroll case — something he didn’t do during the first trial, and which he made clear in the brief interview that he regretted. He said he had been talked out of it last time.“I’m going to testify,” Mr. Trump said, something that his advisers are not uniformly behind.The Iowa caucuses are on Jan. 15. His team is set to leave straight for New Hampshire from Iowa on Jan. 16, the same day the Carroll case begins, and it remains to be seen if that changes.Last year, a jury in a civil trial in a separate case brought by Ms. Carroll found that he had sexually abused her and defamed her in a Truth Social post in late 2022. Mr. Trump continues to rail against the case, which a federal appeals court declined to delay in a decision last week. He has insisted that Justice Engoron has been biased, and has attacked him and his law clerk.The Trump team sees the civil and criminal cases against him as part of a vast conspiracy led by President Biden to thwart his camp, without offering evidence for their claims. They are suspicious of the timing of the Carroll trial, falling the day after the Iowa caucuses in a Manhattan federal courthouse and seven days before the New Hampshire primary. They repeatedly note that Ms. Carroll’s earlier suit was helped financially by the Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.“This is unequivocally a concerted effort to attack President Trump during the height of his political campaign,” said Alina Habba, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in both cases.A spokeswoman for Ms. Carroll said that “regardless of whether Donald Trump shows up at the trial in two weeks, E. Jean Carroll looks forward to presenting her case to a jury whose only job will be to determine how much in additional damages she will be entitled to receive.”David Kochel, a Republican strategist who has been opposed to Mr. Trump, said that mixing his court appearances with his campaign has been, in the Republican primary, successful for him so far, and it’s not surprising he would seek to make the most politically of a problematic month.“It keeps him in the center of the spotlight,” Mr. Kochel said. “It builds into his argument that he is a victim, that he’s constantly being targeted, that this is election interference and all that, so it makes sense to me to be going back and forth because the legal stuff is part of his campaign strategy now, and fund-raising. It’s worked for him throughout this entire process.”It will also keep him in the news — and potentially deprive his Republican primary rivals of oxygen — at a time when the voting is beginning, Mr. Kochel said, adding, “He’s the executive producer of all of this.”But the short-term victories around the civil trials do not necessarily add up to longer-term gains in a general election, said Dan Pfeiffer, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to former President Barack Obama.“Trump is always a ‘deal with the challenges right in front of him right now and then deal with the consequences later’” person, Mr. Pfeiffer said. “This has a cost to him, because — and all the polling shows this — most Americans have paid almost no attention to all of Trump’s cases and they will start to pay more attention.”He added, “Shining a spotlight on his greatest general election vulnerabilities just as the general election electorate wakes up is a high-risk strategy.” More

    • 38 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Biden’s 2024 Playbook

      by

      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicYesterday, we went inside Donald Trump’s campaign for president, to understand how he’s trying to turn a mountain of legal trouble into a political advantage. Today, we turn to the re-election campaign of President Biden.Reid Epstein, who covers politics for The Times, explains why what looks on paper like a record of accomplishment is proving to be difficult to campaign on.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a politics correspondent for The New York Times.The president and his team have waved away Democrats’ worries about his bid for another term.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesBackground readingIn South Carolina, Democrats see a test of Biden’s appeal to Black voters.Political Memo: Should Biden really run again? He prolongs an awkward conversation.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Plans 2 Campaign Speeches to Underscore Contrasts With Trump

      by

      President Biden is intensifying his campaign efforts as he looks toward November, planning a series of speeches that aides said on Wednesday would cast the stakes of the coming election as the endurance of American democracy itself.Even before a single vote is cast in the Republican Party’s nominating race, Mr. Biden and his team are treating former President Donald J. Trump as their de facto opponent in the general election. They’re seeking to frame the contest not as a traditional referendum on the incumbent president and his governance of the nation, but as an existential battle to save the country from a dangerous opponent.With the calendar flipped to 2024, Mr. Biden is making a notable escalation of his re-election campaign with an address planned at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by a pro-Trump mob.The location, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War, is intended to draw a sharp contrast between Washington, who voluntarily ceded power after serving as the nation’s first president, and Mr. Trump, who refuses to accept the results of the 2020 race. On Monday, Mr. Biden will appear in Charleston, S.C., at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church where a white supremacist killed nine parishioners in 2015. The venue embodies the country’s current fight against political violence and white supremacy, his campaign said.The two speeches are part of an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and remind Democratic and independent voters of the alternative to his re-election. In recent weeks, campaign aides have seized on Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric and potentially radical plans for a second term.“The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since,” said Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager. “Our message is clear and it is simple. We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.”Mr. Biden has held only one public event for his 2024 campaign, though in many official White House appearances he has drawn contrasts between his leadership and that of Mr. Trump and other Republicans. He has focused instead on wooing donors in private fund-raising events.Mr. Biden’s appearances will also provide voters with the first side-by-side contrast between himself and his predecessor this election cycle. Mr. Trump is scheduled to hold two campaign rallies on Saturday in Iowa, where he leads the nomination contest by a double-digit margin.For months, Democrats have issued public and private warnings about the need for Mr. Biden’s campaign to engage more aggressively in the 2024 efforts. Polls suggest a neck-and-neck race, with Mr. Biden struggling to energize key constituencies of the Democratic coalition, including young, Black and Latino voters.Biden aides said the campaign planned to hire organizing teams in every battleground state, eventually employing thousands of staff members across the country. A new round of campaign ads is planned later this week.They also plan to dispatch Vice President Kamala Harris on a national tour, focused on abortion rights, that will begin in Wisconsin on Jan. 22, the 51st anniversary of the landmark abortion-rights decision in Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court struck down that ruling in 2022 with the support of three Trump-appointed justices. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Ramaswamy Is Still Sprinting Across Iowa, While His Polling Barely Moves

      by

      Vivek Ramaswamy tore across eastern Iowa on Tuesday at the breakneck pace that has come to define his long-shot presidential campaign.He stopped just long enough at most of the six restaurants and bars on his itinerary to remind voters he’s still in the race, lingering longer at his final stop of the day. He drew praise for his straightforward, bombastic style. And he made humorous quips, promising to finish Donald J. Trump’s mission of draining the bureaucratic swamp in Washington by “bringing the pesticide” to anything that crawls out.But the day mostly served as a stark reminder of how deeply Mr. Ramaswamy remains mired in a kind of swamp of his own, trailing far behind his rivals for the Republican nomination and stuck in fourth place in most state polls. In Dubuque, a few minutes before Mr. Ramaswamy arrived at a cozy cocktail bar where he was scheduled to speak, one of his campaign’s surrogates asked the 50 attendees how many planned to caucus for him. Only about five raised their hands.Some voters at his six Iowa events Tuesday wondered aloud whether he was simply burnishing his credentials for a 2028 presidential run or for a position in Mr. Trump’s cabinet if the former president were to win back the White House.“I think he’s got a really good chance of that,” said Matt Casey, 49, of a possible role for Mr. Ramaswamy in a Trump administration. “He could probably be the vice president real easy.”Mr. Ramaswamy, who has largely financed his presidential bid with the money he earned from his shrewd pitches to investors in his biotechnology business, can probably afford to remain in the contest as long as he desires. And he has maintained that he will outperform expectations and pull off an underdog victory on caucus night on Jan. 15. He has argued that many of his supporters are young people and other first-time caucusgoers not being counted in the polls.“I think we’re going to deliver a major surprise,” Mr. Ramaswamy told reporters on Tuesday.His tactic of hewing close to Mr. Trump’s policies and heaping praise on the former president has won him accolades and respect from Iowa Republicans. But with under two weeks until the caucuses, voters’ support for Mr. Trump seems as ironclad as ever, leaving Mr. Ramaswamy simply as the second-favorite for many.“I’d like to see a Ramaswamy presidency, but I think he’s got a steep hill to climb,” said Jeremy Nelson, 46, who worried that voting for Mr. Ramaswamy instead of Mr. Trump could help Nikki Haley, who is trying to emerge as the main alternative to the former president. “I don’t want a vote for Vivek in the primary to be a vote for Nikki Haley,” he added.Still, Mr. Ramaswamy’s pointed rhetoric impressed many on Tuesday, and changed at least a few minds. At the dimly lit bar in Dubuque, he eschewed his typical stump speech and launched straight into a question-and-answer session as his wife, Apoorva Ramaswamy, a surgeon and cancer researcher, looked on.Mr. Ramaswamy painted himself as a more sophisticated version of Mr. Trump, quoting former President John Quincy Adams one moment and telling a voter that Democrats were “selling us the rope today they will use to hang us tomorrow” the next.He drew applause when he said that unlike Mr. Trump, he would not be led astray by political advisers who stopped the former president from dissolving various federal agencies, ending birthright citizenship or using local law enforcement to aid in the capture of undocumented immigrants.Sandy Kapparos, 75, said she was “very impressed” with Mr. Ramaswamy’s wide grasp of various issues.“He brought up everything,” she said. “He just seemed to know so much about all of it. I was leaning toward Nikki Haley, but now I’m not sure.”Ben Dickinson, a 32-year-old libertarian from Davenport, who visited a Bettendorf event on Tuesday night with his partner and two children, is planning to caucus for Mr. Ramaswamy. He said he thought the candidate had set himself up well should something happen with Mr. Trump’s candidacy. “If Trump were to drop out, then Vivek would most likely get a lot of Trump’s followers because he hasn’t said anything negative against Trump.”Mr. Ramaswamy is hardly the first presidential long-shot candidate who has lingered in a primary far longer than expected, and staying in a race can increase name recognition and pay other dividends. Some also-rans, like former Representative Ron Paul of Texas, built fervent fan bases even as their presidential chances dwindled to near zero.“I think he’ll get his name out there,” Tom Priebe, 75, said of Mr. Ramaswamy’s goal on caucus night. “I don’t know if he’ll do well this time, but maybe next time.”As his hopes of winning the nomination have faded, Mr. Ramaswamy has resorted to a host of tactics, some of them signaling desperation. He rented an apartment in Des Moines, campaigned through Thanksgiving and has packed so many events into his schedule that he frequently shows up late. His campaign said on Tuesday that he had become the first candidate in history to complete the so-called Full Grassley — a tour through each of Iowa’s 99 counties, so named for the trip the state’s longtime senator Chuck Grassley takes each year — two different times.Mr. Ramaswamy has also delved into the fringes of the far right, promoting conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement theory” — the racist idea that Western elites are trying to replace white Americans with minorities. On Tuesday, he trumpeted a new endorsement from Steve King, the former Iowa congressman who was pushed out of office by a primary challenger after his history of racist comments prompted the Republican Party to strip him of his committee assignments in Congress.On Tuesday morning, Robert Johanningmeier showed up to Mr. Ramaswamy’s event at a bar in Waukon, in northeastern Iowa, with a plan. He had a brown “Vivek 2024” hat cued up in the Amazon cart on his phone. Assuming he liked what he heard, he planned on clicking “buy.”But after hearing Mr. Ramaswamy speak, Mr. Johanningmeier still wasn’t sold, although he said he was wavering. He decided to keep wearing the same hat he had walked in with — a camouflage “Trump 2024” cap. The Ramaswamy hat, though, stayed in his cart. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Trump da un paso más en su solicitud de ‘inmunidad absoluta’

      by

      Exfuncionarios del gobierno destacan que la postura de Trump tiene “consecuencias absurdas y de gran alcance”.Casi no hay nada en el texto de la Constitución de Estados Unidos que siquiera respalde de manera remota el más osado argumento de la defensa del expresidente estadounidense Donald Trump contra el cargo de conspiración para anular las elecciones de 2020: que tiene inmunidad absoluta contra cualquier acusación por las acciones realizadas mientras ocupaba el cargo.La próxima semana, un tribunal federal de apelaciones evaluará los fundamentos expuestos en los alegatos, y el panel considerará factores como la historia, los precedentes y la división de poderes. Sin embargo, como ha reconocido la Corte Suprema, la Constitución en sí misma no aborda de manera explícita el tema de la existencia o el alcance de la inmunidad presidencial.En su recurso de apelación, Trump señala que el análisis incluyó una disposición constitucional, aunque su argumento no tiene muchos fundamentos legales. Tal disposición, la cláusula relativa al caso de una sentencia por juicio político, estipula que los funcionarios sometidos a juicio político por la Cámara de Representantes y declarados culpables por el Senado todavía pueden quedar sujetos a un procedimiento penal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Makes Another Pitch to Appeals Court on Immunity in Election Case

      by

      The filing was the last step before an appeals court in Washington will hold a hearing on the crucial issue next week.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday made their final written request to a federal appeals court to grant Mr. Trump immunity to charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing the indictment should be tossed out because it arose from actions he took while in the White House.The 41-page filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was the final step before the defense and prosecution debate the issue in front of a three-judge panel next Tuesday.The dispute over immunity is the single most important aspect of the election interference case, touching not only on new questions of law but also on consequential issues of timing. The case is scheduled to go to trial in Federal District Court in Washington in early March, but has been put on hold until Mr. Trump’s efforts to have the charges tossed on immunity grounds are resolved.In their filing to the appeals court, Mr. Trump’s lawyers repeated some of the arguments they had made in earlier submissions. They claimed, for instance, that a long history of presidents not being charged with crimes suggested that they all enjoyed immunity. They also said that prosecuting Mr. Trump now could unleash a chain reaction of other presidents being indicted.“The 234-year unbroken tradition of not prosecuting presidents for official acts, despite vociferous calls to do so from across the political spectrum, provides powerful evidence of it,” D. John Sauer, a lawyer who has handled Mr. Trump’s appeals, wrote of the idea of executive immunity.Mr. Sauer added: “The likelihood of mushrooming politically motivated prosecutions, and future cycles of recrimination, are far more menacing and crippling to the presidency than the threat of civil liability.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers raised another, even more audacious argument: that because he had been acquitted by the Senate during his second impeachment of inciting insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he could not be tried in a criminal court in the election interference case.But both legal experts and some of the senators who acquitted Mr. Trump have disagreed with that position — not least because the federal charges he is facing are not analogous to those he faced during his impeachment.The issue of Mr. Trump’s immunity claims is legally significant because the question of whether former presidents can be criminally liable for things they did in office has not been tested in court. Mr. Trump is the first former president to have been charged with crimes.But the appeal of the immunity issue has revolved around more than the question of whether Mr. Trump should eventually stand trial on the election charges. It has also touched on the separate, but equally critical, question of when the trial should occur.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have been trying for weeks to keep the trial on schedule, arguing that the public has an enormous interest in a speedy prosecution of Mr. Trump, the Republican Party’s leading candidate for the presidency.Mr. Trump’s lawyers, pulling in the opposite direction, have used every lever at their disposal to slow the case down, hoping to delay a trial until after the 2024 election is decided. If that happened and Mr. Trump won, he would have the power to simply order the charges against him dropped.The immunity challenge is being considered by Judge Karen L. Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, and by Judges Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs, who were put on the bench by President Biden.On Tuesday, before Mr. Trump’s court papers were filed, the judges informed both sides in the case that they should be prepared at the hearing next week to discuss issues raised in several friend-of-the-court briefs that have been submitted.One of the briefs argued that the issue of immunity should never have been subject to an immediate appeal, but rather should have been raised only if Mr. Trump were convicted. Another maintained that Mr. Smith had been improperly appointed to the role of special counsel and lacked the “authority to conduct the underlying prosecution.”Last month, fearing that a prolonged appeal could delay the case from going in front of a jury, Mr. Smith made an unusual request to the Supreme Court: He asked the justices to step in front of the appeals court and consider the case first.Although the justices rejected his petition, they are likely to get the case again after the appeals court makes its decision. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Tracking State Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 Ballot

      by

      States with challenges to Trump’s candidacy Trump disqualified, decision appealed Decision pending Challenge dismissed or rejected Alaska Ariz. Calif. Colo. Conn. Del. Fla. Idaho Kan. La. Maine Mass. Mich. Minn. Mont. Nev. N.H. N.J. N.M. N.Y. N.C. Okla. Ore. Pa. R.I. S.C. Texas Utah Vt. Va. W.Va. Wis. Wyo. Formal challenges to Donald J. Trump’s […] More