The Absurdity of Barring Trump from the Ballot
William Baude and the other "conservatives" who support the ridiculous idea that Trump planned and participated in an insurrection on January 6th and that a person can be barred from the ballot without a criminal conviction or having accepted a pardon will go down in ignominious defeat when this reaches the SCOTUS.
Barring someone who has not even been charged with insurrection or treason, let alone convicted, is a bigger blow to our democracy than anything Putin has ever done. Not only might this lead to retaliation from red states, as material support for BLM and the 2020 riots can also be called insurrectionist activity, but it feeds the narrative that we are not actually a democracy and that lawyers and corporate elites control our government. [Kamala raised funds for rioters; this could be considered material support. If Republican Secretaries of State so wished, they could ban Kamala and Biden from the ballot using this as a justification.] If there is retaliation, we could end up with a scenario where whole swathes of the US are essentially barred from the democratic process. On the other hand, if Republicans do not retaliate, the Democrats will feel emboldened to try this ploy using increasingly slender justification (indeed, the argument against Trump is beyond tenuous). Either way, Democracy suffers.
These people really believe they are defending democracy with this idiotic move—in part because they are all brain damaged autists who can’t even imagine what the world looks like from someone else’s perspective: If you are an “Alex Jones” Republican, this does not look like an attempt to stop a “fascist” from getting into power or to “protect the integrity of the Republican party.” No, it looks like another way of rigging the election. It looks like a lawyerly trick meant to disenfranchise the public. (Indeed, even I wonder if that is not what some of its supporters intended). Moreover, it will have a chilling effect on political protest—what politician would dare call for a protest, or be seen supporting one, and leave himself open to the 14-3 play? Every politician with an ounce of sense will come down against this ruling: Because it is tantamount to saying that you will be held responsible for anything your followers do—when the powers that be deem it useful to do so, at least.
No one who supported this idiotic ploy has even a modicum of my respect any longer. I look forward to their humiliation. Luckily, Colorado and California are trash states anyway, but I look forward to their defeat nonetheless.
This whole thing, by the way, will backfire electorally. Every time you use lawfare against Trump, you simply make the man more popular. Trust me, his polling with surge as a result of this. And the funny thing is, he had almost no chance of taking Colorado anyway; he lost it in 2016, and he lost it again in 2020. If you are going to risk a move that can backfire, do it someplace where the outcome is in doubt—do it someplace where you stand to gain something from it.
I stand by all my earlier criticisms: It is absurd to think section three of the fourteenth amendment violates section one. And it is absurd to think that a call to protest represents an organized act of rebellion. We all know that the actual act of insurrection was carried out by the FBI who used informants to manipulate the crowd in order to justify both a second impeachment and this absurd hail marry play of invoking Amendment 14, Section 3.