The trial over an effort in Minnesota to keep former President Donald Trump off of the 2024 ballot began Thursday at the state Supreme Court as a similar case continued in Colorado.
The lawsuits in both states allege Trump should be barred from the 2024 ballot for his conduct leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. They argue Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says no one who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” after swearing an oath to support and defend the Constitution can hold office.
A group of Minnesota voters, represented by the election reform group Free Speech for People, sued in September to remove Trump from the state ballot under the 14th Amendment provision. The petitioners include former Minnesota Secretary of State Joan Growe and former state Supreme Court Justice Paul H. Anderson.
This will go to the corrupt supreme court, which will determine that this part of the constitution doesn’t count
Technically Minnesota doesn’t have to allow anyone on its ballots, if they have legal justification to prevent them. And there is precedent for this. Alabama kept Harry Truman off their ballot in 1948, even though he was the incumbent president.
If Trump is convicted in Georgia he would run afoul of Minnesota fair campaign section of the state constitution (211B), or hell, I think he has already been fined for infractions that qualify as legal justification to remove him from the ballot in MN based on both campaign finance laws and the fair campaigns section of the MN state constitution.
As the GOP has been doing for the last decade, they have been eroding the federal ability to monitor and manage states’ elections (reducing the voting rights act, etc) current precedent is that the state has the right to handle matters with regard to elections with near impunity.
While the court has its issues, it doesn’t seem to care to side particularly with Trump. They’ve had a few opportunities and have so far mostly sided against or at least failed to side with Trump in matters that either made it that far or tried to make it that far.
And why would they - if you let someone like Trump off the leash, he would disband the SCOTUS. (To say that another way: You can’t weild supreme executive power with some watery tart out there having the final say.)
This is the one part about lifetime appointments… They don’t need to be loyal to Trump the second after they’re appointed. They don’t need to be loyal to anyone except their own judgement on the issues and Congress (which can in theory remove them if they have bad behavior).
They really don’t have any reason to not throw Trump to the wolves if the legal argument stacks up, unless there’s some other kick back going on behind the scenes, or they personally are a huge fan of Trump… Which maybe his own appointments are, at least most of them, but I don’t think the entire conservative block will join those guys and may very well side with the liberal block.
Still, I’m not going to hold my breath, and I fear the implications of this trial either way. The cleanest thing to do would be to just not vote for Trump and beat him in the ballot box. This feels both appropriate and underhanded in a way that might result in violence from the right… But maybe that’s just where we’re at.
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Or, even better, that this part of the constitution doesn’t count for this specific person, in this specific case, at this specific time.
But that it counts for anyone else, at any other time.
Coming up with some asinine excuse to let him off, would in fact be providing aid and comfort to an insurrectionist. That person should also be removed from office (if office counts as any public service beyond presidency and congress)
Who will do the removing?
The people
And with each corrupt ruling, the legitimacy of the federal legal system weakens. Recently polls show faith in SCOTUS (by the public) at 15%
The Weird Sisters have flown in from Scotland to watch.
Hmm, does the supreme Court have jurisdiction over how states conduct elections?
Of course, just look at how they dictated how states could hold their elections during covid
Nope
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You see though this 17th century witch burner once wrote a speech that said our laws don’t matter.
They won’t even have to do that. They’ll just invoke due process and rights of the accused and argue that there is a significant difference between doing a thing and being accused of a thing and thus it has to wait on the courts to decide whether or not he did what he was accused of (and thus whether or not he is barred from holding office).
Then you all will yell about how they’re ignoring that part of the constitution just because he’s Trump. While either arguing that anyone accused of that sort of thing should be barred from running (you really don’t actually want this) or engage in special pleading regarding Trump.