The Patriot Post® · SCOTUS: Time for Some Unanimity

All we can say is that it had better be nine-zip. We don’t need another five-four Bush v. Gore. If ever the American people needed a resounding show of legal certitude from their nation’s highest court, it’s right now.

We’re talking, of course, about the Colorado Supreme Court case from earlier this week in which four dope-addled, Ivy League-educated jurists said former President Donald Trump isn’t eligible to run for president again. He’s an insurrectionist, you see.

Let this be a lesson to all future Republican presidential aspirants: Don’t ever encourage your supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. Otherwise, your gutless political opposition will call you an “insurrectionist” and fumble around for dubious legal arguments with which to knock you off the ballot.

As we wrote yesterday, when Colorado legalized marijuana back in 2012, we remember shrugging our shoulders and thinking, Federalism. And while we had a hunch that the societal impact of easy dope would one day be readily apparent, we had no idea that it would strike the state’s judicial branch so forcefully.

Setting aside the fact that the Colorado case was brought in part by some big-time Biden voters, it’s hard to explain what those four justices were thinking when they dusted off an obscure Civil War-era proscription — specifically, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was meant to keep the postbellum Southern states from sending their erstwhile Confederate leadership to Congress — to kick the opposition party’s standard-bearer off the Centennial State’s presidential ballot. We took this argument apart back in August.

Our Nate Jackson made the crucial point earlier this week: “While Democrats impeached Trump the second time for ‘insurrection,’ and Leftmedia outlets still dutifully parrot that term, not a single J6 defendant, including Trump, has been charged with insurrection, much less convicted. Nevertheless, observed Ed Morrissey, ‘a state court has found Trump guilty of a federal crime with which he’s never even been charged, based on informal allegations of unlawful conduct that took place 2,000 miles from the court’s jurisdiction.’ It’s sheer lunacy.”

As former Trump Attorney General William Barr — a sharp legal mind but no fan of his former boss — told CNN’s Jake Tapper Wednesday: “The core problem here is the denial of due process. … It was a five-day hearing. There was no jury. It was before the judge. They were not able to subpoena witnesses and compel the attendance of witnesses.” He added, “They have a process here that was a procedural Frankenstein.”

Some dismiss all this as “churn,” but it isn’t. There’s a very serious constitutional argument at issue here: namely, can a state use a legally dubious argument to disqualify a candidate for president? Other states are already following suit — more than a dozen now have active lawsuits seeking to kick Trump off the ballot. We don’t much care about what happens in the deep-blue “progressive” wastelands of California and New York, but we definitely care about what happens in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all three of which have Colorado-like lawsuits in the works.

The Colorado decision probably doesn’t matter in terms of the 2024 presidential election. If Donald Trump beats Joe Biden or some other Democrat, Colorado won’t be the linchpin. After all, the state went for Biden by 13 points in 2020 and is thus unlikely to figure in the outcome of the 2024 election. (If Colorado goes red, it’s safe to say that a decisive number of other states will also have done so.) But the decision has caused the state’s Republican Party to threaten to cancel its primary altogether, instead opting for a complicated caucus in March — unless the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down this rogue ruling.

We suspect it will. But that won’t be good enough. We don’t need a 6-3 decision, with the conservative justices going one way and the progressives going the other way — or worse, with “centrist” Chief Justice John Roberts writing some weird accompaniment that allows the Court’s left wing to save face without actually siding with their constitutionally correct colleagues.

As columnist and constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley writes, “The moment has come for nine justices to speak in one voice.”

Where this 14th Amendment argument is concerned, Turley has been the most ardent and vocal of critics, calling it a “shockingly anti-democratic theory.” He continues:

The test for the U.S. Supreme Court is not just what they should do, but how they should do it. As an institution, the Court is often called upon to seize such moments to bring unity and clarity on our core values. That is why this insidious opinion must not only be unequivocally but unanimously overturned. …

Most people understand intuitively that what these four justices did in Colorado was wrong. However, the court can speak as one — conservatives and liberals — in reaffirming the core values discarded by these state justices.

If we had to make a prediction, we’d say this case goes 7-2. Of the Left’s three female justices, Elena Kagan is the most serious, the most constitutionally persuadable. The other two, Jackson and Sotomayor, are probably hopeless.

There used to be a strain within the Democrat Party that wanted Biden to run against Trump. That’s gone. Now they’re desperate. Now they’re freaking out. And this Colorado decision is proof positive. If we didn’t know better, we’d say they’re chickens.

Trump seems to get stronger with every attack: impeachments, civil cases, criminal cases — all of it has failed because the American people sense that there’s something fundamentally unfair and over the top about all of it. They call him an insurrectionist. Call him an authoritarian. Call him Hitler. What’s left for the Democrats other than to take him off the ballot, other than to deny the American people their right to choose a president?

All this is rich indeed coming from The Party of Choice, the party that’s always chirping about “democracy.”

It’s not a democracy, of course. It’s a Republic. If we can keep it.