When the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution didn’t bar Donald Trump from running in the upcoming presidential primaries, it applied the obviously correct construction of the constitutional language, in our view. By doing so by a vote of 9-0, it also put the campaign of legal warfare mounted against Donald Trump these past approximately seven years into sharp perspective.
With the acquiescence of some local judges, several political – and perhaps also emotional – opponents of Donald Trump had successfully sued under Colorado state law to keep him off the ballot in the Colorado Republican primary, invoking a provision of the Fourteenth Amendment that barred certain appointed federal officials who had engaged in “insurrection” from running in the primaries or, for that matter, in the general election.
We have delved into the esoteric nature of the case on several prior occasions. But suffice it to say that for a variety of reasons, while those with a severe case of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) prepared to read some ambiguity into some pretty straightforward language where there is none, there was no way to make a case against Trump.
But that didn’t really matter. Like-minded judges freely accepted exploited legal theories offered by litigious ideologues and hard left legal “experts” who joined the scam.
Some of us spent a lot of time seriously parsing the constitutional language and its history. But the experts jumped up and down and insisted that they were right and Trump was ineligible to run. And so did some of the judges; although different judges in different states with the same issue came out differently and said Trump was eligible to run and serve – something significant in itself.
And then, the Supreme Court took the case for review and all of the Justices – conservatives and liberals alike – agreed that, bottom line, there was no ambiguity as to whether the Constitution prohibited Donald Trump from running. Indeed, they needed to refer to only one ground: only Congress can enforce the exclusion provision.
In a sense, the just decided case could serve as a metaphor for the pile-on legal assault against Trump. Prosecutors have stretched statutory language to the limit in order to fancifully conjure up a number of criminal and civil fraud charges. Again, these are things we have explored on several occasions.
Hopefully, if and when the Supreme Court gets to those cases, the Justices will also see them for what they are.
