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idencyDonald Trump, Petitioner v. Colorado — Part II
I have previously suggested how the Supreme Court should decide this case. Based on the oral argument session, however, it appears they will not get it right, so now I want to look at how this jurisprudential trainwreck came to pass.
Bottom line (aka TL;DR): SCOTUS is afraid to allow Colorado to remove Donald Trump from its primary ballot. The Court is worried about provoking bad actors. But if it’s come to that, we’re already screwed, because the bad actors are out there, and they will (continue to) act badly no matter what the Court does.
Precedent.
In attacking Colorado’s action, Trump’s lawyer relied on two alleged precedents. The first is Griffin’s case (Circuit Ct., Va., 1869), wherein a convict was denied a get-out-of-jail-free card based on the sentencing judge having been an insurrectionist (and therefore ineligible to be a judge). Supreme Court Chief Justice Chase, sitting as a Circuit Court judge, as Justices did in those days, wrote that Section 3 could not be enforced absent Congressional action. Later, however, when Jefferson Davis argued that his automatic disqualification under Section 3 was the exclusive punishment for his participation in the South’s rebellion — so that a treason…