The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that Donald Trump must be removed from that state’s 2024 election ballot ignited outrage on the right. Even some on the left feared the repercussions.

In the fervent debate that ensued, we heard that the amendment applies only to prior “officers” of the government who engaged in insurrection, but the president was not an officer; that Section 3 of the Fourth Amendment pertains only to insurrection, but who is to decide the attack on the Capitol was an insurrection?; that the 1868 amendment was to keep Civil War confederates from regaining office, so what’s that got to do with now? For a couple of days in the week before Christmas, it felt like law school.

Section 3 of the Fourth Amendment bans certain categories of persons from holding office, civil or military, if they have taken an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection against the government. We explained it a short time ago in an article you can access here.

“I think that this case is legally wrong and untenable”, intoned Bill Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general. “And I think this kind of action of stretching the law, taking these hyper-aggressive positions to try to knock Trump out of the race, are counter-productive”.

Michael Luttig, a former U.S. Court of Appeals judge whom we’re told Republicans hold in high regard, fired back with, “The former attorney general is categorically incorrect to the extent that he was commenting on the legal deficiency of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision” and called it “an impeccable decision…irrefutable.”

Jonathan Turley, a conservative law professor at George Mason University who regularly supplies legal commentary to cable news programs, called it “the most anti-democratic opinion I’ve seen in my lifetime”.

All seven Colorado justices were appointed by Democratic governors, only three are Democrats, and they split in their ruling 4-to-3. Nevertheless, on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures”, Wisconsin’s often-confused Republican Senator Ron Johnson said about the decision,

“Well, radical leftism has infiltrated every institution in this country, our courts, our education system, government agencies. It’s a real problem.”

Ahem, the movement to disqualify the former president, currently percolating in over a dozen states, arose from a 126-page law review article that raised eyebrows not only for the depth of its research but because the authors, law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, are both conservatives. Moreover, the Colorado case was brought by six Republicans.

the quibble

The Colorado Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s holding that Section 3, which is restricted to someone who had been “an officer of the United States”, doesn’t pertain to the presidency because the president is not an officer. Before the Colorado high court announced its decision, Luttig said that he “can’t imagine the [U.S.] Supreme Court deciding this case on that frivolous argument.” Harvard professor emeritus and renowned constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe said about the office/officer parsing, “The judge herself says she admits this sounds preposterous — that’s her word”. New York University law professor Melissa Murray agreed with Luttig that “the text of the 14th amendment would seem to be absurd if it “excluded the president from those “who could not hold office because of their participation in an insurrection”.

old law

What about the anachronism of a Ninetieth Century law? Murray says there’s a good argument that…

Congress didn’t anticipate the prospect of an insurrectionist president. They were more worried about the prospect of an insurrectionist Congress, people infiltrating Congress who were former members of the Confederacy.”

Well, yes, but they didn’t just pass a law. They went through the exhaustive process of making it an amendment to the Constitution, a permanence meant to apply for all time.

insurrection? says who?

Colorado deciding it was an insurrection drew greatest debate. The Right asks where has it been adjudicated that January 6th was an insurrection? They decry that the Colorado court took it on itself to make that decision about what Republicans say was only a riot.

There’s reluctance even on the left. The problem for Harvard political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, authors of two well-received books warning of another Trump presidency, is — as they said to Andrew Prokop of Vox — that no institutional entity, no electoral authority, no judicial body was established to decide what constituted insurrection.

Trump rival Chris Christie said it was inappropriate to remove Trump from the ballot for inciting an insurrection without that first having been decided in a criminal trial. Or that a body such as a legislature needs first to activate Section 3, that otherwise it is inert, that the amendment cannot be applied until ‘insurrection’ has been decided elsewhere.

Where’s that in the amendment, the left asks. They have repeatedly said it is a self-executing rule, in the same way that no court case or legislative body is needed to decide that someone under age 35 or born outside the U.S. cannot run for president.

Jonathan Last, at right-leaning The Bulwark, writes of the Colorado case, “But we do have a legal process and in this case, the legal process was followed assiduously. There were no shortcuts, no extraordinary maneuvers”.

Lawyer and never-Trumper George Conway elaborated on one of the early morning talk shows:

“The constitutional provision says nothing about conviction. They could have easily, when they wrote that provision, said ‘someone convicted of insurrection cannot hold public office’. It does not say that. So what that means is, the courts are free to determine on their own…what is an insurrection and whether the facts meet that. What happened here was there was a five-day trial where Donald Trump and his lawyers got to participate [along with many witnesses] and a judge made extensive findings that Trump engaged in insurrection not just by a preponderance of the evidence, which is your lower basic civil court standard, but by clear and convincing evidence, and you don’t see the dissent challenging those findings at all!”

Jonathan Chait, who writes “The Intelligencer” at New York magazine, is ardently against Trump but comes short of saying it was an insurrection. It’s a term he says he has used as a shorthand but…

“When I have the chance to use a longer description, I generally say that Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office… [T]here is at least some grounds to question whether it was an ‘insurrection’ in the meaning intended by the 14th Amendment. Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”

It was a surprising turnabout for Chait to escalate “insurrection” to nothing short of “breakaway republic” when Merriam-Webster defines it as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government”- quite what we saw that January 6th when Trump attempted to block certification of the election and steal the presidency.

let the people decide?

Some out of exasperation with the tortured arguments, others minimizing Trump’s role, there are those who lobby for letting the voters decide. “This is a time that we actually need democracy. We need to allow the voters to vote”, says Jonathan Turley. Fox News host Laura Ingraham calls the decision “the ultimate in election interference”.

Chait wrote,

“To deny the voters the chance to elect the candidate of their choice is a Rubicon-crossing event for the judiciary. It would be seen forever by tens of millions of Americans as a negation of democracy.”

How would it not be a Rubicon-crossing event to ignore the plain language of the Constitution? Waiving the Fourteenth Amendment is John C. Calhoun’s nullification.

Beyond the disqualification matter, “just let the people vote” is often heard from the Right. The ballot box should be the supreme arbiter where all the cases against Trump should be decided, wiping away all the indictments and absolving him of all alleged crimes.

Kurt Bardella, a former staffer for Republicans Senator Olympia Snowe and Congressman Darrell Issa, exposed that hypocrisy as an MSNBC guest:

“You cannot say, no, the people should decide, when you try to overthrow the will of the people on the floor of the United States House of Representatives the evening of January 6 where 150 Republicans voted to throw out the results of a free and fair election.”

On to D.C.

Colorado’s deadline for freezing its ballot is January 5th. Their secretary of state says the U.S. Supreme Court must step in, assuming it will, with haste else the state supreme court’s decision will stand and Trump will not be on the ballot.

It is foregone that the Court would not dare disqualify Trump, not after infamously deciding who should be president in 2000’s Bush v. Gore, but how are the six conservatives to refute the evidence-based assertion of the Colorado court that it was an insurrection and that Trump was its instigator? Or hang so momentous a decision on the quibble between ‘office’ and ‘officer’? Or decide that an old constitutional amendment was meant only for something else and has become moot? We might at least be amused watching the avowed textualists squirm free of the unequivocal language of the 14th amendment, but that they will do, and Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment will become extinct.

The true Donald Trump has come out over the last few months. There have been symptoms all along, but now his fascist longings and racial hatreds have burst forth unrestrained. They have become his manifesto.

It has become standard for him in his campaign rallies to hold up for praise the dictators of other countries. He seems to be applying for membership in their club — they are of course listening – but also he is selling his audiences on autocracy as a better way than the democracy that has been the bedrock of this country for a quarter millennium. Last Saturday in New Hampshire he said this:

“Has anybody here ever heard of Vladimir Putin, of Russia, [he] says that Biden’s, and this is a quote, politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system which cannot pretend to teach others about democracies.”

He spoke with admiration of “powerful” president Xi of China “who controls one-point-four billion people rather ruthlessly, right?”. He touts his “very good relationship” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the world’s most brutal human rights oppressor. And we are to take in the endorsement of Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who espouses a tightly controlled “illiberal democracy” and says “Trump is the man who can save the western world”, Trump quotes him saying.

These are the exemplars he holds in high regard in contrast to how he views Americans who are not his followers of whom he spoke on this year’s Veterans’ Day:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections…The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”

Forbes was quick to identify Trump’s speaking of Americans as “vermin” as

“a term frequently used by Nazis to dehumanize Jews, including a 1939 quote attributed to Hitler: ‘This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies’, he told the Czech foreign minister.”

New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose field of study is fascism, reported the same of Mussolini who “literally talked about killing rats…who were bringing infectious diseases and communism into Italy.” As a propaganda technique, dehumanizing conditions followers to discard compassion for groups held in contempt by the authoritarian leader so they will accept anything from oppression to genocide once the regime makes its move, as Germany did accept the extermination of Jews by the Nazis.

The groups that Trump targets are migrants. The overflowing southern border is an out of control mess that cannot be minimized, but note the way Trump speaks of people who have gone through arduous physical hardship trying make their way across hundreds to thousands of miles to the United States to escape threats to their lives at home or to escape from poverty, simply hoping to find a better life:

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”

That was in an interview in October with a right-wing website, The National Pulse. Prisons, insane asylums, terrorists — there’s no evidence for any of this. How could he know? It’s a total fabrication. Again, he dehumanizes to bring along his followers to think of them as undesirable people irrespective of their actual nature.

“Poisoning the blood” drew stunned reaction politically and in the media. Revealed is a man running for president of our country who follows the teachings of Adolf Hitler. In several passages of “Mein Kampf” the “Führer” wrote that the “Influx of foreign blood” was a “poison” that polluted his strivings for a Germany of pure Aryan blood superior to all other races. And, of course, this was more about Jews than anyone else. Is it coincidence that Trump hit upon that phrase? Was it fed to him by his racist henchman Stephen Miller? In a September 1990 Vanity Fair profile of Donald and his first wife Ivana at the time they were divorcing, she told her lawyer that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table.

“Poisoning the blood” got the attention. Overlooked is his saying that migrants are coming from…

“all over the world not just in South America, not just in three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia. All over the world, they’re pouring into our country.”

He is sending the message all over the world that they are inferior people, that his white America must not be contaminated. This is now his standard rhetoric, repeated three days later in Iowa. “They’re destroying the blood of our country. They’re destroying the fabric of our country. And we’re gonna have to get ’em out”.

Trump has said that he will not only send troops to the border to seal off migrant intrusions into the U.S. but will embark on what fellow xenophobe Steve Bannon says will be “the largest deportation plan in history. All 10 million must leave”. But it is Stephen Miller, rabidly anti-immigrant despite his maternal grandparents being from Belarus, who will probably become the deportation czar of a Trump regime. Just this week on Fox News he said about migrants,

“We are being conquered. This is a complete resettlement of America in real time…Now we have millions of people coming in from different cultures and different ways of living and different belief systems…Unless there is massive, large scale deportations by the millions, it will be irrevocable.”

Trump intends to expand the travel bans that he instituted shortly after becoming president. His executive order banned entry into the U.S. by anyone from seven predominantly Muslim countries. To this he would now add anyone from Gaza. For him Haiti and Africa are “shithole” countries, as he told a group of senators in 2018. He will discriminate based on “Judeo-Christian civilization and values”, he told supporters in Iowa.

unitary is another name for…

Trump’s deportation plan is only one item in a vast intended overhaul of the government, a plan with a longer name but referred to as “Project 2025”. Largely architected by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, along with some eighty contributors, it’s a subject of its own. It advances what is known as the “unitary” presidency where s single individual, the president, holds all the power. Trump has accordingly spoken of tightly reining in the departments and agencies of the federal government that will, if he returns to power, take direction from him and will not be free to act on their own initiative. This is practically the definition of fascism, defined by Mussolini as “everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” where the dictator becomes the state.

Trump has made clear that he intends to use the Justice Department as a tool of vengeance, wielding it against those who have opposed him, who have violated the “nothing against the state” edict. He says,

“I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out of control fake crooked prosecutor in America for their illegal racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”

In 2016 he told his followers “I am your voice” but in his first campaign rally in March of this year in Waco, Texas, that phrase became,

“I am your warrior, I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”

Channeling Mussolini, whose equivalent word was “avenging”, Trump intends to appoint a submissive attorney general who will prosecute those on his enemy list. “He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list”, Mark Milley told The Atlantic in a profile of the general, who recently stepped down from the highest position in the military, the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs. In a tweet – he calls it a ‘truth’ at his Truth Social copy of Twitter – Trump wrote that for Milley “in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH” for Milley’s having assured a worried China that in his final days as president Trump would be prevented from any warring action he might take to stay in power. Others on his list are his former attorney general Bill Barr for undercutting his claim of a fraudulent 2020 election, and his second chief of staff, Marine four-star John Kelly, who has persistently warned America about Trump.

Next on the list: journalists.

“He’s begun occasionally soliciting ideas from conservative allies for how the U.S. government and Justice Department could go about turning his desires — for brutally imprisoning significant numbers of reporters — into reality.”

So reported Rolling Stone. The First Amendment means nothing to Trump. Nor does the Constitution. A year ago he called for the termination of the Constitution in a post on Truth Social which said,

“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

A couple of weeks ago, in reply to Fox News’s Sean Hannity asking for assurance that he would not abuse power for retribution, Trump joked, “Except for Day One”. But this week came the Colorado Supreme Court’s disqualification of him from the state’s ballot. Trump’s reaction was a reminder of the summer of 2020, when he began setting up his claim that there would be floods of fraudulent ballots — groundwork for his ultimately insisting the election was stolen. In his reaction to Colorado, are we seeing first signs of how he will indoctrinate the worshipful that he will have no choice but to govern as the following says?:

“A ruling party is attempting to amass total control over America by rigging the election against its leading opponent who happens to be a political outsider committed to defending the needs and interests of hardworking Americans. This is how dictatorships are born.”

In a country become a madhouse, it is often difficult to stay caught up. In the last few days we had House Speaker Mike Johnson blurring faces of January 6th Capitol rioters lest the DOJ identify them, Cassidy Hutchinson warning of Donald Trump’s “volcanic” temper, Trump saying he would only be a dictator on ‘Day One’ back in office, and Liz Cheney saying once back he would never leave.

First, Johnson: Not until he was made speaker did it become known outside of congressional circles that Republicans had elected as
Johnson
leader not only one among the many Republican representatives who believed the election was stolen, but had elected no less than the member who had led the effort in the House to keep Trump in the White House. Mike Johnson of Louisiana (who we profiled here) had solicited fellow Republicans to sign onto an amicus brief he had authored that made the illegal case for decertification of Biden’s election.

Liz Cheney, on tour for her book “Oath and Honor”, said Johnson, an arch-conservative like herself, whom she called a friend and a man of principles, had sent out a caucus-wide e-mail that said (in paraphrase, we’ll assume),

“Donald Trump has directed me me to make a list, effectively to take names, of who is signing onto our amicus brief and who is not and he’s going to be very disappointed in those who didn’t”.

His lawyer told him it was wrong and “wildly unconstitutional”, but Johnson went ahead anyway, even telling members that the brief didn’t assert fraud, which it did, so he misled members to get their signatures. On January 6th, 139 House Republicans would accordingly vote to overthrow the election. Most of them were re-elected in 2022.

blurred transparency

So in Trump’s thrall is Johnson, that he is using his post to sanitize the history of that day. He thinks there should be transparency so unlike McCarthy’s reluctance he is releasing all of the video footage taken January 6th. The motive is obvious. Propagandists can now assemble a trove of only the segments of rioters ambling through the great halls of the Capitol in awe of its grandeur. Video showing them in a bloody fight against the Capitol police and breaking into the building so that they can be awestruck will be snipped out. Just peaceful tourists. What insurrection? Johnson let the genie out of the box, to use Trump’s malaprop:

“We’re going through a methodical process of releasing [the video] as quickly as we can. As you know, we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ.”

For Johnson, second in line for the presidency, to be identified and arrested for bludgeoning police and engaging in insurrection is to be “retaliated against”. Obstructing an investigation by a federal law enforcement agency by hiding the identities of persons in the act of committing a crime against the country is Johnson’s idea of holding to his oath to the Constitution.

Dictator for a day

The man Johnson is so eager to serve was given a full fact-check-free hour on what continues to call itself a news channel. We were pleased to hear Donald Trump tell Fox News’s Sean Hannity he
Hannity

will not be a dictator. When Hannity first asked, “Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever if re-elected president to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?”, Trump dodged the question. Sean tried again later:

Hannity: “Under no circumstances you are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody…”

Trump: “Except for Day One. I wanna close the border and I wanna drill, drill, drill.”

Hannity: “That’s not retribution”.

Trump: “I love this guy. He says, ‘you’re not gonna be a dictator, are ya?’ I said no, no no, other than Day One…After that, I’m not a dictator”.

Eager for America to have its first dictator, Hannity’s audience clapped and whooped deliriously. By the way, Trump’s “drill, drill, drill” is misinformed nonsense. The U.S. produces more oil and gas than both Saudi Arabia and Russia. For one who wants to be president, his not knowing that earned ridicule from “Morning Joe”‘s Joe Scarborough:

“What a stupid thing to say — drill, drill, drill. You can tell he doesn’t read the newspapers…People who applaud ‘drill, drill, drill’, how stupid they are because that’s what we’re doing right now.”

Trump went on to say that had he still been president,

“You wouldn’t have had Ukraine and Russia, you wouldn’t have had the attack on Israel. We would have withdrawn from Afghanistan with tremendous strength and power. That’s the way I had it set up.”

Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, had already told the House select committee investigating
Hutchinson
January 6th, that on hearing Attorney General Bill Barr say that the the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, Trump had hurled his lunch against a wall in the White House and she and others had to scrub off the ketchup. Talking to MSNBCs Lawrence O’Donnell this past week, she said there had been several such incidents, that the 45th president was incapable of controlling himself and erupted often:

“Of all the reasons that Donald Trump should never be anywhere close to the Oval Office again, this may seem like a minor one — but his volcanic temper. He deserves to be nowhere near the nuclear code buttons.”

Ms. Hutchinson also revealed that Rudy Giuliani told her Trump planned to go to the Capitol. His apologists have said he had no plans to as a way to dissociate him from the insurrection.

sleepwalking

Liz Cheney on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” cautioned,

“People who say, well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous
Cheney
because we have all these checks and balances, don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. One of the things we see happening today is sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”

On NBC’s “The Today Show” there was this exchange:

Savannah Guthrie: “Do you believe that if Donald Trump were elected next year that he would try to stay in office beyond a second term?

Cheney: There’s no question.

Guthrie: You think he would try to stay in power forever.

Cheney: Absolutely. He’s already done it once. He’s already attempted to seize power and he was stopped, thankfully, and for the good of the nation and the republic.

dictator do list item

In keeping with his saying the press is the “enemy of the people”, invoking the same phrase that Twentieth Century dictators had used — Stalin, Hitler, Mao — Trump hinted at one of his dictatorship plans when 13 minutes into “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell”, the prime-time show on MSNBC, Trump posted on Truth Social this tweet, or as they call it over there, a “truth”:

O’Donnell picked up on that in the following night’s show saying,

“The man who Republican members of Congress call ‘Orange Jesus’ wants to shut down MSNBC…and we know what Donald Trump
O’Donnell
means by ‘come down hard’. He means completely destroy; he means violently attack the way he wanted Trump supporters to come down hard on Congress on January 6.”

O’Donnell ridiculed him:

“I would call that a lie if I didn’t think Donald Trump was too stupid to know that that is a lie.”

Why? Because television for Trump originated when there was only over-the-airwaves broadcasting by the three networks, NBC, ABC, CBS. He was 40 when cable arrived but, as O’Donnell chides,

“Obviously no one explained to Donald why they called it cable television. So, to this day, he does not know that cable television has never been broadcast over free government-approved airwaves, which is why cable television, unlike the old broadcast networks, has never been subject to FCC jurisdiction in any way… which is why you hear all that profanity on HBO.”

O’Donnell says he was the only one to call Trump a liar when in 2011 Trump began questioning Barack Obama’s birth certificate and whether he was born in the United States. (The New York Times didn’t call Trump a liar until 2016.) Trump had tried to get him fired then and again in 2015.

O’Donnell looked at the news broadcasts of the same day of Trump’s threat to come down hard on MSNBC and made the observation that,

“[T]his country has reached the point where the former president of the United States, who is the leading Republican candidate for president, has publicly threatened to shut down a cable network and that is not news. If any previous president or leading presidential candidate in either party ever made such a threat, it would have been the lead story in every news organization in the country — every TV channel, every newspaper — and now it is not news.”

The three broadcast networks deliver news to 20 million viewers each night, far more than all other television sources combined, but Trump’s portent for MSNBC earned nary a mention on the nightly news of NBC, ABC, or CBS.

It was also a day in which Trump called rival candidate Nikki Haley a “birdbrain”, but that got no mention on the big three. Bigger still on this same day, Trump said in a post he was “looking at alternatives” to Obamacare. Something that “would have been the lead story in campaign coverage but was completely ignored”, said O’Donnell, who wrapped up with:

“The news media is going to fail again in covering the presidency. It’s going to fail. Do not think you can depend on the news media to cover this campaign correctly. You are going to have to do that work yourself. You are going to have to save democracy, if it’s going to be saved, yourself. It is going to be up to you.”

a red state example

All of what we relate above was reported in the liberal media. Conservative media reported none of it other than, as in the Hannity example, treated it as a joke. What is happening is kept from the Trump worshippers by the rightwing media.

Liz Cheney told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow:

“[M]any of those in Wyoming who were the most upset or angry were unaware of the violence on January 6. They believed the day to have been almost entirely peaceful. They read The Epoch Times, a news [air quotes] website that presents extremely slanted reporting in the guise of a straightforward media outlet. They believed what they saw on their social-media feeds. They watched almost exclusively Fox News or Newsmax or OAN. As a result, they were completely unaware of what had actually happened.”

And with the election coming, there is therefore no breaking through to them. They will blindly vote for Trump.