Donald Trump’s 14th Amendment denouement
Recently, Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified from the state’s ballot for the 2024 election because of his participation in the January 6th insurrection. Donald Trump’s lawyers, feigning shocked surprise and counterfeit indignation, have vowed to appeal this ruling all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
Many talking heads and pundits claim to be fairly sure about what SCOTUS will decide. Why they feel the need to categorically proclaim that surety out loud and in public is a complete mystery to me. The current SCOTUS includes 6 of the most psychotic, loony, dangerous, stupid and arbitrary morons in its history, as far as I can tell. Predicting the actions of a bunch of raving nutjobs is not my idea of a good time. So you’ll pardon me if I sit this one out.
Be that as it may, I can at least apprise you of what some self-anointed psychics are proclaiming. Ty Cobb, not the ex-Detroit Tiger but Trump’s former White House lawyer, for example, is sure that SCOTUS will strike down the ruling by a vote of nine to nothing. His reason? Because he believes “the law is clear.”
But that makes me want to ask Cobb, if “the law is clear” in this case, why didn’t the Colorado Supreme Court see it? If the “law is clear,” what makes him think that the 6 crackpot, religious whack-jobs of SCOTUS are going to see it?
“The real key issue in this case is, is Trump an officer in the United States in the context in which that term is used in the Article 3 of the 14th Amendment?” Cobb explained. “And in 2010, Chief Justice [John] Roberts explained … that people don’t vote for officers of the United States.”
Whatever you say, fella. But I doubt that the original architects of the fourteenth amendment intended to include a suicide pact clause, where Jefferson Davis could become president later if he wanted to. Remember, these 6 morons on the current SCOTUS are the same morons who struck down fifty years of precedence when they invalidated Roe v. Wade. They don’t seem real clear on what the law says. You may want to stick with baseball, Mr Cobb.
Then there are some who proclaim the 6 SCOTUS loonies will vote against Trump because they’ve gotta protect their phoney-baloney jobs, gentlemen. After all, they might “reason,” if Trump becomes Dictator-in-Chief, he won’t have much use for one of those Supreme Court thingies. There’s certainly something to be said for that in the world of the sane, but will this SCOTUS see that?
It’s true, this SCOTUS frequently breaks rank with Trump, as they did when he wanted to appoint a special master to oversee his documents theft trial. It may be because they like to flex their muscles and prove that nobody owns them, not even Donald Trump.
Who knows? In their supreme, condescending arrogance they don’t always explain themselves. Even so, they certainly have one advantage that a lot of the crazy, shithouse rats of Congress don’t have: they can’t be thrown out by the voters. That’s a pity, because if they could they almost certainly would.
Like I said, if you want to know what SCOTUS will do next, I’ll let you know once they’ve done it. Arbitrariness is the stuff of autocrats and, in their supreme, swaggering hubris, the 6 idiots of this SCOTUS have lost what minds they had and seem to operate more out of whim than anything else. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.