President Donald Trump speaks in Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday. (WTVR CBS 6 / YouTube screen shot)
Published March 4, 2024
Imagine, if you will, a country in which local, state, and federal prosecutors coordinate with the ministry of justice, foreign-born billionaires, and the nation’s leader to keep the leader of the opposition party off the election ballot, and then bankrupt and imprison that opposition leader.
That country would face sanctions from the civilized world. Corporate media would decry the role of thugs who want to take the voice of the people away by denying them the ability to vote for their candidate of choice.
Perhaps people would even take to the streets to protest such actions and the death of democracy.
That could only happen in a third-world banana republic, right? After all, aren’t those the tactics of Putin in Russia, Maduro in Venezuela, and Castro in Cuba?
Sadly, this is not the situation under some socialist dictator. It is the current political situation in the United States under the Biden Administration.
The Republican front-runner and presumptive GOP nominee for president in the 2024 election is being attacked on multiple fronts through something that has become known as lawfare.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 9-0 on Tuesday, simply stating that responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and the states the “judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand.”
This should once and for all eliminate any argument to keep the former president off the 2024 ballot.
Even though former President Trump can appear on the ballot, it is important to understand the history of the attempt to remove him from the ballot, and who was behind this effort.
Officials in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois ruled that Mr. Trump is ineligible to be on the 2024 presidential ballot because he violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
More specifically, these officials asserted that because of his actions on January 6, 2021, Trump violated Section Three of the amendment, which states that no person who has taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States can hold office if they engage in an insurrection or rebellion against the United States.
Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment was written after the Civil War to keep former Confederate officials from gaining power in the government.
To date, only one official has been removed from office for his actions on January 6. And the ruling of the Supreme Court may bring that decision into question.
A New Mexico County commissioner, Couy Griffin, was removed from office for violating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment by State District Court Judge Francis Mathew, the first time since 1869 that a judge has removed a public official under Section 3.
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SOURCE: www.thegatewapundit.com
RELATED: Dems have a problem with their democracy argument, not with the Supreme Court
The court’s ruling made clear that Democrats are going to have to make their case against Trump at the ballot box.
Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his Get Out the Vote Rally at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex Special Events Center in Greensboro, North Carolina, on March 2, 2024. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO
Published March 4, 2024
When the Supreme Court ruled Monday that states have no authority to remove Donald Trump from the presidential ballot, it dealt a blow to any Democratic hope of a deus ex machina stroke saving the party from the former president’s reelection bid.
If Democrats are going to stop Trump, they’re going to have to quash him at the ballot box.
For weeks, Democratic officials have argued as much. The finality of the highest court weighing in cemented it.
“It’s pretty clear to me what the former president was trying to do on Jan. 6, and his followers,” Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, told POLITICO. “But I still think in terms of giving the people the chance to vote on this, it’s just the best way to put it to rest.”
But the ruling was significant in another way. It exposed the limitations of a critical component of the Democratic case against Trump: that the ex-president was and is bad for democracy. While the justices did not rule on whether Trump engaged in an insurrection in his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, they rejected the effort by his critics to disqualify him on those grounds. It comes at a time where recent polling shows Democrats have struggled to portray Trump as a threat to democratic governance.
A recent CBS News YouGov poll found that only 34 percent of registered voters say democracy and the rule of law will be safe only if Biden wins, just one percentage point more than those who say the same for Trump. That’s an almost even split on an issue that Biden and his advisers have said will animate his campaign.
Whether those results are accepted by Biden’s inner circle is not settled. Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said the reelection effort didn’t “really care” about the ruling. “It’s not been the way we’ve been planning to beat Donald Trump,” Fulks said at an MSNBC event. “Our focus since day one of launching this campaign has been to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box.” But Mike Donilon, among the president’s closest advisers, told The New Yorker in a rare interview that the campaign’s “focus will become overwhelming on democracy.”
“I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th,” he said.
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SOURCE: www.politico.com
