As Justice Samour points out in his dissent, however, what's missing from the majority's analysis is due process of law. Not only has Mr. Trump not been convicted of insurrection either by a jury of his peers or from the bench by a judge; he hasn't even been charged with it. Tellingly, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has brought an aggressive case against the former president for conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding and more -- but not for violating the federal law against insurrection. The penalties for that, by the way, include disqualification from "any office under the United States."
The Post also notes that any other state court could strike Biden and Harris from the ballot for their support of BLM, which was much more of an insurrectionary movement than a four-hour riot.
Disqualifying a candidate based on an accusation, albeit one blessed by a state court judge as in the Colorado case -- but not an actual conviction -- is dangerous. What's to stop a Republican politician from seeking to bar his Democratic opponent because the opponent attended Black Lives Matter protests, claiming that those protests, some of them nominally in service of abolishing the police, qualify as insurrection?
Instapundit says the "elites" are playing a game of "civilizational jenga," pulling out one strut keeping the tower standing after another.
What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing. One by one, they're withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse. They're taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.
What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved -- let's call them "the morons" for convenience's sake -- are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I'm increasingly convinced that there's a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it's doing, and is fine with it.
Roger Kimball gets at it in a recent piece:
"This is the same old trick," Trump said when he got the news that the Colorado Supreme Court voted 4-3 to keep him off the primary ballot for the 2024 presidential election.Oops. Sorry. I got my papers mixed up. That was actually Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when he got the news that some Southern states had voted to keep him off the ballot. Eventually 10 states did so.
So here we are again. It's a bit like that Army Major in the Vietnam war who explained that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Just so, the virtuous people of Colorado have decided that in order to save democracy they need to destroy it.
In fact, what they have just voted to preserve is not democracy but "Our Democracy (TM)." Here's the difference. In a democracy, people get to vote for the candidate they prefer. In "Our Democracy," only approved candidates get to compete.
Donald Trump is the opposite of an approved candidate. The untrammeled hermeneutical ingenuity of the American legal profession had be let loose against Trump. As I write, he faces huge legal battle in four states. . . .
Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is. He is an enemy, not of the state, exactly, but of the state of mind that constitutes "Our Democracy(TM)." When he unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, the beautiful people, beginning with his opponent Hillary Clinton, couldn't believe it. They denounced the election as fraudulent. "Our Democracy(TM)," you see, means "rule by Democrats."
Now they are warning that, should Trump be reelected, he would be a "dictator," a new Hitler, etc. He would weaponise the Department of Justice against his enemies, they claim, and use the FBI to harass his opponents. Stay tuned for the seminar on what the Freudians call "projection": it meets this afternoon in a democratic redoubt near you.
In a more civilized version of America -- one that existed just a few decades ago -- the notion of waging this sort of unrestricted lawfare against a leading presidential candidate, much less a former president -- would have been considered ridiculous, and had it been taken seriously, would have been seen as enormously risky.
When considering any political tactic, after all, one question is what happens if it doesn't work. But sometimes an equally important question is, what happens if it does?
Say the various Democratic flacks, special prosecutors, and state attorneys general somehow manage to eliminate Trump. What happens?
Half the country -- maybe more -- will conclude that the whole system is rigged, that the establishment doesn't follow the rules, and that it will gang up on anyone it sees is a threat. They will conclude, in short, that the government, and indeed the entire system, is illegitimate.
And they will be right. And the politicians of even a generation ago recognized that as enormously dangerous.
Read the whole thing. The Regime is fomenting a civil war, from above.