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Wednesday Morning Rant

Post-Republican

Yesterday, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and cannot be listed on that state's primary election ballot in one of the most egregious examples of judicial activism in our history. I won't go into the details - better men than I already have - but it is clear that the reasoning is tortured. Some amendments mean what they don't say while others don't mean what they do say. How did they arrive at their bizarre and dishonest conclusion? Political expedience, as always.

Trump is appealing to SCOTUS, of course. Despite that, the deadlines are what they are and unless SCOTUS does something by the first week of January, Trump's not going to be part of Colorado's first presidential primary election (it was until now a caucus state). Whether SCOTUS upholds or rejects the state Court's ruling in time to matter for the general (whether Trump is on that ballot or not) is somewhat beside the point. This is the crossing of a Rubicon, and not just because of the activist illogic and pseudo-legal divination of a bunch of hacks in black.

In the gallons of ink already spilled on this topic, it is clear that the left fairly generally is in full approval of this preemptive subversion of the will of the electorate. The cognitive dissonance on full display on the Left is, as always, remarkable. From DU:

The decision is a mixture of federal constitutional and state law.

The Colorado Supreme Court should have the last word on state law. SCOTUS should be hard pressed to separate the federal constitutional issues from the state statutory issues.

We know what a SCOTUS majority will want to do but it will be a trick to write a decision that is not blatantly outcome determinative.

So the SCOTUS ruling would be "blatantly outcome determinative" but the state's Supreme Court ruling that removes a candidate from the ballot is, for some reason, not "blatantly outcome determinative." So the big brains have their rationalization, but what about the chattering classes at DU? It's about what you'd expect. The ones not snarking about ketchup (Trump puts ketchup on steak, dontchyaknow) are just reveling. Very few of the big brains at DU have even the slightest pause, and their opinions are dismissed:

My problem with this is that
He hasn't been convicted of anything yet.

I think he's a horrible person who should never have been elected, and yet was, and the thought of him ever being in office terrifies me almost beyond belief, but he hasn't been convicted yet. I anticipate he will be, but this seems like something the Senate should have done after his second impeachment...and yet didn't.

C'mon, bro. Don't be so old-fashioned.

But that's DU. It's a dumpster fire anyway, right?The higher-brow (seriously, at least for this one) Daily Kos is more caught up in legal minutiae in the decision and the motivations of the justices. Full approval, of course. They're thrilled that "democracy" will be denied to Colorado's voters. It doesn't matter that Trump (or any Republican) doesn't have a hope in hell of winning in that state's general - the choice must be precluded.

But those are just chatterers. They don't get bylines. What of those who do? Well, Amanda Marcotte of Salon fully supports the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Constitution by a court in quite some time because, of course, it's obvious:

A shameless insurrectionist is running for president while under 91 felony indictments. To add to this historic situation, the Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday banned Trump from appearing on the state's Republican presidential primary ballot. The 4-3 decision follows the clear language of the Constitution's 14th Amendment barring those who "have engaged in insurrection" from running for office. Yet anyone who thinks they know how this will play out over the next 11 months is kidding themselves. The one thing that is dead certain, however, is that the Supreme Court justices would be fools not to uphold this decision.

Fools indeed. They might suffer the wrath of activists with extralegal protections.

But Salon are hacks, too, right? Those straight-shooters at Politico are surely more even-handed, right? Well:

... said Ian Bassin, executive director of the nonpartisan but highly Trump-critical group Protect Democracy. "So if the Court is just applying the law, then a straight read of the law requires them to uphold the Colorado decision. ... But of course the Court does not exist in a vacuum. It is responsive to politics, and the political reality is that Donald Trump has built a large political following."

Ah, so the issues of legality, constitutionality or appropriateness are beyond question. It's obvious that the Colorado ruling is correct and proper, it's just that a political court beholden to Trump and his degenerate supporters hate the law. Top-notch political journalism.

The aftermath of and attitude about this ruling is, I think, evidence of the ongoing death throes of representative government - not in practice, but in spirit. Even among left-wingers who timidly say, "hey, maybe we should pump the brakes on this, eh," they are immediately opposed and silenced. If SCOTUS overturns this as it rightly should, these same papers and forums will decry the injustice of giving people a choice in an election. The dominant power movement in the country, the movement with most of the institutional authority, no longer even pays lip service to the notion that people should pick their own government.

Welcome to the Post-Republic.