US supreme court

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court justices have strange views on whether Trump is disqualified | Moira Donegan

      by

      Elena Kagan once referred to Jonathan Mitchell sarcastically as “some genius”. That was in oral arguments surrounding SB8, the bounty-hunter abortion ban that Texas succeeded in passing before the overturn of Roe v Wade, which Mitchell wrote, pioneering a cockamamie scheme for evading judicial review.Mitchell, a far-right lawyer currently vying for a spot in the second Trump administration, is a fan of this kind of bald, legal bad faith: you can’t quite call him duplicitous, because he never quite pretends that the law really leads him to the conclusions he’d like to reach. He’s more about coming up with novel legal schemes to get to his desired outcome and trusting that the federal judiciary, captured as it is by Federalist Society acolytes and wingnut cranks, will go along with him because they share his political proclivities.That’s what worked for him with SB8: the supreme court allowed Texas’s abortion ban to go into effect long before Dobbs: not because Mitchell made a convincing argument, but because he offered them an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway.Something similar happened in Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v Anderson, a question about whether Donald Trump is disqualified from holding federal office under section three of the 14th amendment.The case reached the supreme court after a Colorado court found that Trump’s actions on January 6 disqualified him. The court wanted to disagree and was desperate to find a way to restore Trump to the Colorado ballot without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump committed an insurrection or not. Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, gave them very little help: he gave a shoulder-shrugging argument to the justices, after filing a bizarre and strained brief that primarily focused on the absurd claim that the president is not an “officer.” Left to their own devices, the justices went fishing, looking for an argument that could plausibly allow them to exit the case, since Mitchell did not provide them one.The winning entry came from Justice Samuel Alito, who first offered the suggestion that a state like Colorado did not have the authority to enforce section three of the 14th amendment without congressional permission. The rest of the justices seemed to like the sound of that and were soon all asking questions about the scope of state authority over the administration of federal elections.It was a bit of an odd argument: the court recently came close to embracing a much more wide-reaching vision of the authority of state legislatures to govern federal elections in their borders, in its address of a rightwing legal curiosity called the “independent state legislature theory”. And the notion that section three of the 14th amendment requires congressional action to go into effect is on its own peculiar: no other section of the amendment has been found to require such instigating legislation from Congress, and the language of the amendment itself suggests that the disqualification of onetime insurrectionists is something that Congress has to act to turn off, but not to turn on.It is strange, too, that the court, which in past years has made dramatic and ruinous changes to American life out of its professed loyalty to our nation’s “history and traditions”, chose to more or less completely ignore the suggestions of history here. The 14th amendment’s section three has seldom been enforced – in part because of the rarity of insurrections – and so there are few impediments to the court’s self-styled originalists delving headfirst into the history of the amendment’s intention and context.But instead the justices chose to dismiss the considerable evidence that the framers of the 14th amendment intended section three to be used precisely to protect the republic from a figure like Trump. They attend themselves instead not to the lessons of the past, but to the incentives of the present.By the end of the arguments, it was clear: what the justices will write will be a 9-0 or 8-1 decision (only Sonia Sotomayor voiced much dissent) saying that section three is not self-enacting, or at any rate that the states cannot enact it themselves. They will have arrived at this conclusion not because the argument was made persuasively or at all by Trump attorney Mitchell – it wasn’t – and not because it is the place where the text compels them to arrive – it isn’t. They will instead have fabricated this reasoning out of whole cloth, because it gets them out of an inconvenient question: the question of whether the constitution’s substantive protections for democracy can withstand the stress Trump applies to them.One point that several of the justices touched on, and which has been taken up by those skeptical of the Colorado case and similar efforts to disqualify Trump from office on 14th amendment grounds, is the notion that his disqualification would be somehow anti-democratic, disenfranchising the people who would like to vote for him and would not get a chance to.But democracy means more than the simple ability to vote; it requires a commitment to constitutional principles – to the limits of an office, to the rights of the minority, to the separation of private and public interests among those in power and to the willingness to place the dignity of the country before the petty preferences of the man who leads it.Trump has no intention of upholding these principles. We know: he tells us all the time. To disqualify him would not be to undermine democracy but to protect it, by averting the seizure of the republic by the man who has been quite frank about his intention to destroy it.Meanwhile, section three of the 14th amendment now seems set to be orphaned – denied its status as self-effecting, curtailed in its enforcement by the states. If section three is still the law, and if insurrectionists are still barred from taking federal office, then how can this law be enforced? And that’s where the court, in its apparent effort to avoid having to take much of a stand on the issue, seems to have planted a loaded gun. Because if states can’t enforce the ban on insurrectionists in office, then only Congress can. And where would Congress do that? At the certification of the electoral votes – on 6 January 2025.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      US supreme court justices skeptical about removing Trump from ballot – video report

      by

      The US supreme court heard arguments on whether former president Donald Trump should be removed from the ballot on Thursday after Colorado voters filed a lawsuit last year alleging he was ineligible to run for president under a little-used provision of the constitution’s 14th amendment.

      Most justices, liberal and conservative, seemed skeptical of Colorado’s arguments and seemed to agree that states could not act without action from Congress More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden described as ‘elder man with poor memory’ in damning classified document report – live

      by

      Special counsel Robert Hur wrote that he was concerned jurors would not believe that Joe Biden “willfully” kept classified documents, and that was one of the reasons why he does not think the president should face charges.“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur writes.“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”Hur wrote that: “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully – that is, with intent to break the law – as the statute requires.”In addition to the statement from Donald Trump himself, Make America Great Again Inc. – a super PAC supporting the former president’s campaign for election in 2024, has released its own comment on Hur’s report.“If you’re too senile to stand trial, then you’re too senile to be president,” said Alex Pfeiffer, communications director for Make America Great Again Inc. “Joe Biden is unfit to lead this nation.”Former president Donald Trump has released a statement via his campaign regarding the findings in the report from Robert Hur, saying “THIS HAS NOW PROVEN TO BE A TWO-TIERED SYSTEM OF JUSTICE AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL SELECTIVE PROSECUTION!” [sic].Trump referenced his own classified documents case, in which he is charged of willful retention of national defense information, false statements and representations, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation and a scheme to conceal. That case is expected to go to trial in May 2024.
      The Biden Documents Case is 100 times different and more severe than mine. I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more. What Biden did is outrageously criminal – He had 50 years of documents, 50 times more than I had, and “WILLFULLY RETAINED” them. I was covered by the Presidential Records Act, Secret Service was always around, and GSA delivered the documents. Deranged Jack Smith should drop this Case immediately. ELECTION INTERFERENCE.
      Republican chairman James Comer of the House committee on oversight and accountability has issued the following statement on the report from special counsel Robert Hur:
      Americans expect equal justice under the law and are dismayed the Justice Department continues to allow Joe Biden to live above it. Joe Biden willfully retained classified documents for years in unsecure locations and intentionally disclosed them yet faces no consequences for his actions. The House Oversight Committee has been investigating Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and we have uncovered key facts that unravel the White House’s and President Biden’s personal attorney’s narrative of events. Additionally, important questions remain about the extent of Joe Biden retaining sensitive materials related to specific countries involving his family’s influence peddling schemes that brought in millions for the Bidens. While the Justice Department has closed its investigation, the Oversight Committee’s investigation continues. We will continue to provide the transparency and accountability owed to the American people.
      In addition to the statement, Comer said the White House was not cooperating with interviews the committee has requested with current and former White House staff who were involved with organizing, moving and removing boxes that contained classified materials.He stated that the report confirmed Biden retained documents related to China and Ukraine, “two countries the Bidens have solicited and received millions of dollars from”.You can read special counsel Robert Hur’s report into Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents, as well as the rebuttal from the president’s attorneys, below:Attorneys for Joe Biden objected to special counsel Robert Hur repeatedly mentioning the president’s memory problems in his report.Referring to his conversation with Mark Zwonitzer, ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad, Hur writes: “Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”He later goes on to describe Biden as showing “diminished faculties and faulty memory” in his conversations with Zwonitzer.In a letter written to Hur dated earlier this week and included in the report, the president’s special counsel Richard Sauber and personal attorney Bob Bauer took issue with the special counsel’s language:
      We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate. The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events. Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report, particularly one that in the first paragraph announces that no criminal charges are ‘warranted’ and that ‘the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt.’
      They continue:
      Not only do you treat the President differently from other witnesses when discussing his limited recall of certain years-ago events, but you also do so on occasions in prejudicial and inflammatory terms. You refer to President Biden’s memory on at least nine occasions – a number that is itself gratuitous.
      Sauber and Bauer requested Hur “revisit your descriptions of President Biden’s memory”. He apparently did not do so.Special counsel Robert Hur included in his report photos of where Joe Biden’s classified documents were stored:In a just-released statement, Joe Biden said he “threw up no roadblocks” to Robert Hur’s investigation of his possession of classified documents, and notes he spoke to the special counsel even in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.The president’s comments came after Hur’s report noted that it would be difficult to convince jurors the “elderly” Biden intentionally kept government secrets, and related his inability to remember important dates during interviews with the special counsel.Here’s what Biden had to say, in full:
      The Special Counsel released today its findings about its look into my handling of classified documents. I was pleased to see they reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach – that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed.This was an exhaustive investigation going back more than 40 years, even into the 1970s when I was a young Senator. I cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays. In fact, I was so determined to give the Special Counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8th and 9th of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis. I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed.Over my career in public service, I have always worked to protect America’s security. I take these issues seriously and no one has ever questioned that.
      Special counsel Robert Hur wrote that in an interview last year, Joe Biden struggled to recall key chapters in his personal and professional life:
      In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Eiden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
      Biden’s lack of ability to remember things would make it hard to prosecute him, Hur said:
      We also expect many jurors to be struck by the place where the Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.
      A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of. We have considered – and investigated – the possibility that the box was intentionally placed in the garage to make it appear to be there by mistake, but the evidence does not support that conclusion.
      Special counsel Robert Hur wrote that he was concerned jurors would not believe that Joe Biden “willfully” kept classified documents, and that was one of the reasons why he does not think the president should face charges.“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur writes.“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”Hur wrote that: “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully – that is, with intent to break the law – as the statute requires.”In his report, special counsel Robert Hur outlines how Joe Biden “willfully” disclosed classified documents, but says the available evidence does not establish the president’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur wrote in the report’s executive summary. “These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods. FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home.”Justice department policy prohibits bringing charges against a president while they are in office, but Hur notes that, even if that were not the case, he would not recommend charging Biden.The special counsel then goes in to why he does not think jurors would convict Biden. The reasons include evidence suggests Biden simply forgot he had classified material, or that jurors believed that when he found it, he would not have realized he was breaking the law, because the former vice-president was so used to seeing such documents.The White House was provided a copy of special counsel Robert Hur’s report into Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents, and reviewed it to determine if it revealed privileged information.Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House counsel, said no changes were made: “We notified the justice department at approximately 9.00 this morning that our privilege review has concluded. In keeping with his commitment to cooperation and transparency throughout this investigation, the president declined to assert privilege over any portion of the report.”There will be no criminal charges filed in the classified documents investigation involving Joe Biden, Reuters is reporting, citing MSNBC, which is attributing that to an unnamed law enforcement official.More details soon.Meanwhile, Trump and Biden’s classified documents cases (in which the former president has been criminally charged and the current president has not) have similarities, there are also some notable differences.The White House said Biden’s attorneys found a small number of classified documents and turned them over after discovery.Trump resisted handing over boxes of classified material until a 2022 FBI search turned up about 100 classified documents, leading to obstruction of justice charges against Trump and two employees at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.The White House said Biden and his team have cooperated with special counsel Robert Hur and his investigators. Biden cannot face federal criminal charges as a sitting president under a longstanding justice department policy.The findings could pose political headaches for Biden who has sought to draw a contrast with Trump on issues of personal ethics and national security.Hur’s report, and his decision not to bring criminal charges, are likely to fuel accusations of a double standard from Trump and his Republican allies.[But] Trump was charged after prosecutors said he refused for months to turn over boxes containing presidential records he had taken to Mar-a-Lago and took steps to conceal the documents after the US government demanded their return. Trump has pleaded not guilty and a trial is scheduled for May but is likely to be delayed.The special counsel in the Biden classified documents investigation focused on documents related to Biden’s service as vice-president in the Obama administration from 2009-2017 and from his prior tenure in the US Senate, Reuters reports.Members of Joe Biden’s legal team found classified papers at the office of his Washington thinktank and the US president’s personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware.Biden’s lead rival in the November election, former president Donald Trump, faces a 40-count federal indictment for retaining highly sensitive national security documents at his Florida resort after leaving office in 2021 and obstructing US government efforts to retrieve them.The US Congress has been handed the special counsel report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents dating to his years as vice-president to Barack Obama, Reuters is reporting, citing an unnamed source familiar with the matter.The US president was interviewed by special counsel Robert Hur last October and the case relates to actions taken before Biden took the White House.Earlier last year US attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Hur to investigate Biden’s retention of classified documents from his time as vice-president.At the time, lawyers for Biden reported having found classified documents at his home and former thinktank.One day after he strengthened regulations on soot pollution, EPA Administrator Michael Regan spoke about pollution controls’ impact on children at an environmental advocacy event in Washington DC.“This is deeply personal for me,” he said. “Every morning when I leave the house I’m kissing my ten year old son on the forehead and hoping to be the best dad and the best administrator that I can.”Regan described Thursday’s new soot rule as a “gamechanger,” especially for young people, whose developing bodies are more vulnerable to the health effects of pollution – and who face various other hardships.“This is one thing we’re taking off their plates,” he said.Regan spoke at a meeting held by national environmental advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force on Thursday at the National Press Club.Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, spoke earlier in the day about the Biden administration’s attempts to “infuse principles of justice and equity into everything.”She touted one Biden administration program which allots 40% of certain environmental federal investments to communities most affected by the climate crisis and pollution.Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton also spoke about environmental pollution at the event at the National Press Club.“We know that in our warming climate, the dangers are particularly acute for our youngest,” she said.Clinton spoke the children-focused efforts she is helming at the Clinton Foundation, of which she is vice-chair. One project: partnering with advocates working to keep schools open year-round, since they serve as not only educational facilities but also as cooling centers in many communities.The Thursday event convened youth advocates, doctors, environmentalists, and public health advocates who called on Americans to work together to push for better regulations on air pollution.“Your voice does matter,” said Nsedu Obot Witherspoon, who directs the Children’s Environmental Health Network. “A lot can really happen when mothers, parents, teachers, come together”Moms Clean Air Force, an national environmental advocacy group, held a summit at the National Press Club on Thursday, featuring guests including Chelsea Clinton and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan.Founded in 2011, the organization works to strengthen protections from planet-heating and toxic pollution. It is made up of 1.5 million members, many of whom are mothers.The event comes amid increasing public concern about the climate crisis and pollution, and before a presidential election that will prove crucial for environmental policy in the US.The Biden administration is currently rushing to finalize key environmental protections, including tightened standards on emissions from power plants and vehicles’ tailpipes.“We have enormous challenges in front of us,” said Dominique Browning, co-founder and director of Moms Clean Air Force.“We have never felt greater urgency to get things done.”Paul Billings, who is national senior vice president of public policy at the American Lung Association and was a panelist at Thursday’s event, said that in recent decades, political polarization has proved a major challenge in passing environmental protections. It should not be, he said, because “everyone has lungs.”Panelists also discussed the ways children are disproportionately harmed by pollution and global warming, because their smaller, developing bodies are more vulnerable to health risks.Another major challenge: the rise of mental health issues tied to concern about the climate crisis.“We’re seeing more and more children who are presenting with climate anxiety,” Dr Lisa Patel, executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and pediatric hospitalist, said.After about two hours of arguments, the supreme court’s nine justices seemed broadly skeptical of the effort to keep Donald Trump from the presidential ballot over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. It is unclear when they will issue a ruling. Across the street at the Capitol, the Senate advanced a measure providing assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, following a botched attempt to also include hardline immigration policy changes Republicans demanded, then decided they did not like. The GOP wants to make amendments to the legislation, and it’s unclear what its reception will be in the House, but progress on this long-running negotiation appears to finally be happening.Here’s a recap of the day’s events thus far:
      Trump listened in to the supreme courts arguments, which, to his ears, sounded “beautiful”.
      Jason Murray, an attorney for the people challenging Trump’s eligibility, warned the supreme court that the question could “could come back with a vengeance” if he is allowed to run.
      Law professor Derek Muller of the University of Notre Dame predicted the high court would rule quickly.
      The Senate’s vote to advance a bill that will provide assistance to three countries Washington considers national security priorities is a sign of progress in what has been a tortuous and chaotic process.Democrats have wanted for months to approve aid to the three countries, but the GOP, which controls the House and can block passage of legislation in the Senate using the filibuster, demanded they also agree to hardline immigration policy changes. But when those changes were announced earlier this week after months of bipartisan negotiation, Republicans decided they did not like them either, and Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said a bill pairing the border security changes with foreign aid money would not get a vote in his chamber.Yesterday, the Senate voted down that version of the legislation after Republicans and some Democrats objected. The Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer immediately moved to put up for a vote the legislation that funds only Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, without addressing immigration policy at all. The Senate just a few minutes ago voted to advance that legislation.But the story is far from over. It’s unclear if the House will approve the legislation, and Schumer said Senate Republicans want to make amendments before final passage:
      We hope to reach an agreement with our Republican colleagues on amendments. Democrats have always been clear that we support having a fair and reasonable amendment process. During my time as majority leader, I have presided over more amendment votes than the Senate held in all four years of the previous administration. For the information of senators, we are going to keep working on this bill until the job is done. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Consequences weigh heavily for justices at Trump 14th amendment hearing

      by

      In the end, the supreme court justices displayed little interest in the finer details of constitutional law, which normally pays their salaries and over which the country has been obsessing now for days.Who is an “officer of the United States”? Leave that to one side. Should the 14th amendment’s disqualification of insurrectionists in federal posts apply only to office holders or can it also be deployed against electoral candidates? Let’s come back to that.Even the big question – did Donald Trump engage in insurrection in luring his supporters to the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – barely got a look in at Thursday’s historic oral arguments. Only one of the nine justices, the liberal-leaning Ketanji Brown Jackson, asked a single question of Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, inviting him to state his position on such a vexed and burning issue.No, Trump did not, Mitchell predictably replied, in part because an insurrection had to be “an organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government”. Jackson shot back with the forensic wit that in her 18 months on the mahogany bench has become her trademark.“And so a chaotic effort to overthrow the government is not an insurrection,” she said. It was a rare moment of release in more than two hours of dense legal discussion.What the justices were, almost to an individual, concerned to talk about was what the consequences of their judgment would be, both for American democracy and for their own standing. Should they side with the Colorado supreme court, and remove Trump from the ballot, then what?Elena Kagan, another of the three liberal-leaning justices, wanted to know whether a victory for Colorado would effectively impose that state’s decision to cast Trump into the wilderness on the voters of all other states. “Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?” she pondered.Samuel Alito, one of the hard rightwingers on the court, wondered whether the logic of Colorado’s argument – that a federal office holder who committed insurrection should immediately and automatically be disqualified – would allow military officers to cease obeying a president’s orders from the Oval Office.John Roberts, the chief justice, looked inward, asking himself what the consequences of stripping Trump from the Colorado ballot would be for his own court. He painted a picture of a dystopian world in which a ruling that sided with Colorado would unleash a flood of partisan challenges from other states under the insurrection clause, each of them with different standards of proof and evidentiary rules.“In very quick order, a goodly number of states will say, whoever the Democratic candidate is, ‘You’re off the ballot’, and others, for the Republican candidate, ‘You’re off the ballot’, and it will come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election. That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”Not least for Roberts himself. “We will be deciding whether there was an insurrection when one president did something, as opposed to when somebody else did something else. So what do we do?”For Roberts, this was more than merely a question about possible future workload. It was far more existential than that: it was a heartfelt cry that the court should avoid being dragged into the contentious thick of presidential elections, where only grief could lie.As time ticked on, and the arguments continued, it became clear that the Roberts’ view – pragmatic, cautious, allergic to future controversy – was widely shared by almost all the justices. Such uniformity of opinion raises the prospect of a rapid decision in coming days, with an 8-to-1 vote or even 9-to-0 being eminently possible (the only point of uncertainty being the third liberal justice, Sonia Sotomayor, who contributed little).Such an outcome would make Roberts the second biggest winner of the day. He will hope that a unanimous or near-unanimous ruling on such an explosive issue will help redeem the court amid growing public skepticism over its many corruption scandals and blatantly partisan rightwing jurisprudence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe chief justice is only too well aware of the low esteem in which his court is already held by the American people, and he is desperate to avoid further slippage. A recent NBC News poll found that only 28% had a positive view of the justices, the lowest rating in the poll’s history.The biggest winner, of course, is Trump. Barring a major surprise, the court is all but certain to overturn the Colorado ruling and keep the former president back on the ballot. After the pounding he has taken from the courts in recent days, it will mark a rare – and no doubt heavily-exploited – victory.There is one other aspect to the winners and losers from Thursday’s deliberations, and it’s the most important one of all. How does democracy come out of all this?Brett Kavanaugh, one of three rightwing justices appointed by Trump, was clear that keeping the former president on the ballot was a win from democracy. “What about the idea that we should think about democracy, and the right of the people to elect candidates of their choice? Your position has the effect of disenfranchising voters,” he told the lawyer representing the Colorado plaintiffs, Jason Murray.It was one of several critical comments directed at Murray from the bench. But it invoked a parting warning from the lawyer.Should Trump win in November, the question of an insurrectionist returning to the White House will not have gone away. In words that may yet haunt the court, he said: “I think it could come back with a vengeance.” More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Removing Donald Trump from ballot could have ‘daunting consequence’, says chief justice – video

      by

      The chief justice of the US supreme court, John Roberts, argued that removing Donald Trump from states’ primary ballots for the presidential election could mean some states would remove the Democratic candidate, some states would remove the Republican candidate, leaving the presidential election to just a few states.

      A majority of justices, including some from the court’s liberal wing, voiced concern about the chaos that would ensue if they allowed states to decide whether to disqualify candidates when they debated Colorado’s decision to rule Trump ineligible to run for office for inciting insurrection More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      US supreme court hearing focuses on Trump’s eligibility for 2024 election

      by

      The US supreme court will hear oral arguments on Thursday morning in the high-stakes case that will probably determine whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for president this year.The case, Donald J Trump v Norma Anderson et al, came about after six Colorado voters filed a lawsuit last year alleging Trump was ineligible to run for president under a little-used provision of the constitution’s 14th amendment. The provision says that any member of Congress or officer of the United States who takes an oath to defend the constitution and then subsequently engages in insurrection is barred from holding office. The ban can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote by both chambers of Congress.Trump’s conduct during the January 6 Capitol attack disqualifies him from holding federal office, the Colorado voters claimed in their suit, filed last year in state court. After a five-day trial, a judge found Trump had engaged in insurrection, but was not an “officer of the United States” and declined to remove him from the ballot. In a 4-3 decision in December, the Colorado supreme court reversed that ruling and barred him from the ballot. The supreme court agreed to hear the case in January.While there have been several suits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot, only Colorado and Maine have done so thus far. A Maine judge last month ordered the secretary of state there to hold off on excluding Trump until the US supreme court issued a decision.A decision upholding the Colorado supreme court’s ruling would not automatically remove Trump from the ballot across the country. While some states have rebuffed efforts to remove Trump from the primary ballot, a supreme court saying Trump can be disqualified would probably set off a flurry of fast challenges in state courts and other tribunals to disqualify him from the ballot in the general election.It’s generally believed that Trump has the upper hand at the court, where conservatives have a 6-3 supermajority and Trump nominated three of the justices. Still, experts say there is a high degree of uncertainty over what exactly the court will do because it has chosen not to limit the scope of arguments before it and the issues are so unprecedented.In their briefing to the supreme court, Trump’s lawyers have claimed there will be “chaos and bedlam” in the US if a leading presidential candidate is blocked from the ballot. They gave an array of arguments to the justices for why he should not be disqualified, including that the word “officer” does not apply to the president and that he did not engage in insurrection.“In our system of ‘government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people’, the American people – not courts or election officials – should choose the next President of the United States,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “The Colorado voters, backed by the left-leaning non-profit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), argue that it is absurd to claim the 14th amendment does not apply to the presidency and that it would be a danger to democracy to allow him to hold office again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Section 3 is designed precisely to avoid giving oath-breaking insurrectionists like Trump the power to unleash such mayhem again,” they write. “Nobody, not even a former President, is above the law.”There is no legal precedent for the case – the justices will be wrestling with the key issues in the case, including whether Trump committed insurrection on January 6 for the first time. The 14th amendment was enacted after the civil war to bar former Confederates from holding office and has never been used to bar a presidential candidate. In 2022, the amendment was used to remove a New Mexico county commissioner from office, the first time it had been used that way in a century.The case marks the court’s most direct intervention in a presidential election since its controversial decision in Bush v Gore in 2000. Seeking to preserve its reputation as an apolitical body, the court is usually hesitant to get involved in heated political disputes, but the arrival of the Trump case makes the court’s intervention in the most controversial of political cases unavoidable. It comes as public confidence in the court continues to decline amid a series of ethics scandals and politically charged decisions. More

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We were a voice in the wilderness’: the groups fighting to keep Trump off the ballot

      by

      A US supreme court case that could remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot is the culmination of several years of work by left-leaning watchdog groups to reinvigorate the 14th amendment and its power.A Colorado case that found Trump couldn’t run for re-election there was filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), though other groups and individuals have filed lawsuits and petitions in many states trying to remove Trump under the 14th amendment’s third clause. The clause says that people who were in office and participated in an insurrection against the US can’t hold office again.Some of the challenges have gone through the courts, while others have appealed directly to elections officials in charge of placing candidates on the ballot. Colorado was the first ruling to decide against Trump, so it is headed to the supreme court at the former president’s behest. Because of how consequential and rare the issue is, it was expected that the high court would eventually be the arbiter of how the clause applied in the modern era.Crew, a non-profit that has focused in part on Trump corruption issues since he took office, researched the 14th amendment and found it was “really built for this moment”, said Noah Bookbinder, the organization’s president. The group first brought a test case against a local elected official in New Mexico who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Couy Griffin, then a county commissioner in Otero county, New Mexico, was removed from office for violating the 14th amendment.“We would have ideally liked to bring a number more of those kinds of cases to really establish more of a track record and some more precedent,” Bookbinder said. “Donald Trump sort of forced our hand because this was the person who had really, really landed this attack on a democracy.”Crew challenged Trump just in Colorado, which became the first state to rule Trump ineligible, but it isn’t the only group working on 14th amendment cases. Another non-profit has been working on keeping Trump off the ballot for several years.Free Speech for People, an advocacy non-profit founded in the wake of the Citizens United ruling in 2010, focused on Trump corruption cases soon after the former president took office. It was among the first groups to call for Trump’s impeachment.In 2021, Free Speech for People wrote letters to secretaries of state around the country alerting them to the 14th amendment and how it would affect Trump if he ran again. In 2022, Free Speech for People challenged several members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, on 14th amendment grounds, though the cases weren’t successful at preventing them from running. Once Trump was officially a candidate, the group filed lawsuits challenging his eligibility in Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, Illinois and Massachusetts.“Back in the middle of 2021, we were kind of a voice in the wilderness,” said Ben Clements, the board chair and senior legal adviser to Free Speech For People. “There wasn’t a lot of support for this view, and that’s obviously changed a lot.”The concept received a boost from two conservative law professors, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, who wrote a law review article in August 2023 arguing that Trump could not hold office again based on their reading of the constitution.Aside from the two major groups bringing cases, one man has filed lawsuits in various states without legal representation. John Anthony Castro, a Texas Republican and frequent candidate for various offices who says he is also running for president, has challenged Trump’s eligibility in the most states, with no success. Castro, a tax-return preparer, was recently indicted himself for filing false tax returns.And individual voters or groups of voters have challenged Trump’s eligibility in their states as well. In Maine, voters brought their challenge to the secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, who decided Trump should not be placed on the ballot there. Maine’s challenge is on hold pending the outcome of the supreme court case.Crew and Free Speech for People hope the supreme court gives a thorough ruling on all facets of the case to provide legitimacy for the court’s decision and indicate what should happen next. If Trump is removed from the ballot, challenges could pop up in many more states against the ex-president and others.“We really think as a legal and factual matter that the courts have to get into the meat of it,” Bookbinder, of Crew, said. “But we also think that that is better for the country for the court to give some clarity on the core issues.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      US supreme court to hear arguments on keeping Trump off 2024 ballot

      by

      The US supreme court will hear oral argument on Thursday in one of the most high-stakes cases in American politics this century, thrusting a beleaguered court to the center of the 2024 election.The court is considering whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for president. The novel legal question at the heart of the case, Donald J Trump v Norma Anderson et al, is whether the 14th amendment to the constitution prohibits Trump from holding office because of his conduct on 6 January 2021. Section 3 of the amendment says that any member of Congress or officer of the United States who takes an oath to protect the constitution and then subsequently engages in insurrection cannot hold office. That ban, the amendment says, can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress.There is no precedent for the case. The 14th amendment, enacted after the civil war, has never been used to challenge the eligibility of a presidential candidate, but the idea began picking up steam after two conservative legal scholars published a 126-page law review article last summer arguing the amendment clearly disqualified Trump.A group of Colorado voters sued under the law last year, relying on the theory to try to disqualify Trump from the ballot. After a five-day trial, a Colorado district court judge said Trump had committed insurrection, but was not disqualified because he was not an officer of the United States. The Colorado supreme court reversed that ruling in December, removing Trump from the ballot in a 4-3 decision. While lawsuits have been filed in dozens of other states seeking to remove Trump from the ballot, only Colorado and Maine have done so thus far.The justices accepted a request from Trump to hear the case and expedited its review because of Colorado’s fast approaching 5 March primary. The compressed schedule and likely quick turnaround of the case means that oral argument – currently set for 80 minutes on Thursday – could offer an unusual level of insight into how the justices are weighing the arguments.“I feel more at sea than I usually do,” said Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California Los Angeles, who co-authored an amicus brief urging the court to rule definitively on the case now. “There are a million ways the court can go. The court has given no signal, at all, as to which of those directions it wants to go in. And so, more than usual, I’m going to be very closely listening to the oral arguments to see which arguments are resonating with which justices.”The case also arrives at a perilous moment for the court itself. Public confidence in the court has been declining, exacerbated by a series of ethics scandals and controversial decisions that came down along ideological lines. The court is essentially now seen as a political body and as a result, the betting money seems to be that they will find a way to keep him on the ballot. Trump appointed three of the six justices in the supermajority on the body.“I don’t think it wants to be involved in these disputes. I think, on a bipartisan basis, there’s an interest on staying as far away from these issues as possible,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, who wrote an amicus brief in the case that wasn’t in support of either party.Trump’s lawyers offer five reasons to the court for why he should not be disqualified from the ballot. First, they argue that the word “officer” in the 14th amendment does not apply to the presidency. His lawyers also argue that his conduct on 6 January did not amount to insurrection and that the 14th amendment cannot be enforced absent implementing legislation from Congress. Last, they say, the Colorado supreme court cannot invent its own criteria for running for president nor can it interfere with the method the legislature has chosen for selecting presidential electors.The idea that the president isn’t an officer is nonsensical, lawyers for the six Colorado voters – four Republicans and two independents – who filed the case wrote in their own brief. “Section 3 does not give a free pass to insurrectionist former Presidents. The Constitution says the Presidency is a federal ‘office’. The natural meaning of ‘officer of the United States’ is anyone who holds a federal ‘office’,” they write.Trump’s arguments to the court essentially amount to the idea that “somehow there’s a Donald Trump specific loophole”, said Donald Sherman, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the Colorado voters.“Donald Trump’s arguments are not about January 6. They’re not about the fundamental goal of Reconstruction, the Reconstruction amendments, or the 14th amendment. Or section 3. They’re basically about creating an exception that allows Donald Trump to wriggle out of accountability.”They also point out that Trump’s conduct on 6 January would have clearly been understood to amount to insurrection by the framers of the 14th amendment. “The original public meaning of “engag[ing] in” insurrection extends to those who organize and incite it,” they wrote.The brief also notes that the federal constitution gives states the power to only allow candidates who are qualified to appear on the ballot – no federal legislation is necessary to enforce that.“The more I spend time on this case, the harder it seems for Trump,” Muller said. “I don’t think the court is interested in one-offs. The notion that the Colorado supreme court got Colorado law wrong is not gonna interest the court.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe challengers in the case have been bolstered by amicus briefs from historians who argue that the public would have understood the 14th amendment to apply to the president and to cover the kind of conduct Trump engaged in. Those kinds of arguments could hold sway with the court’s conservative justices who are professed adherents of originalism – understanding the constitution through its original public meaning.Hasen predicted the court would try to resolve the case without addressing of whether Trump engaged in insurrection – the most politically charged issue in the case.“I was thinking what are ways the court can side with Trump without weighing in on the merits of whether he committed insurrection,” he said. “One of them is Congress has to pass a statute [to enforce the disqualification provision]. If I had to lay down money on how Trump would win if he wins, I guess I’d put a few dollars down on that, but I’m not betting the farm.”A ruling upholding the Colorado supreme court’s decision would not mean that Trump would be automatically kicked off the ballot in every US state. Instead, each state would probably have to have its own legal proceedings to determine whether or not he should appear. Some states have already rejected such efforts ahead of the primary, setting up a potentially confusing and chaotic legal sprint to the general election.“I think people think if they say he’s ineligible it’s gonna end it, but it’s not,” Muller said. “It would be a state-by-state basis in the primary. He could still win the primary so there’s this whole separate layer of what the RNC would do at a convention if its candidate would be kept off the ballot in some states.”At the core of the case are two competing ideas of democracy. Trump and his attorneys argue that any effort to kick him off the ballot would be anti-democratic since it would prevent voters from choosing their preferred candidate for the presidency.“The court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.The challengers and their supporters argue that protecting democracy requires banning those who attempt to subvert democracy from holding higher office. “Our democracy is not a chaotic free-for-all in which anyone can be elected. The voters are entitled to decide within the framework of the applicable rules,” the good government group Common Cause wrote in an amicus brief supporting the challengers.“If Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (“Section 3”) is not enforced in this case, there is a genuine risk that our system of government will not survive,” they wrote. More