• fiat_lux@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    The insurrectionist ban is only for people who participated in the civil war

    My guess is this one or close to it. It’s going to be an originalist interpretation of something like the definition of “insurrectionist” or “armed” and include a phrase like “the founding fathers didn’t envision…”. The reasoning might be some bad esoteric case law from the 1800’s that defines insurrectionists as carrying literal muskets and pitchforks therefore Trump is not one.

    That and they may just stall for time until after the election and claim they couldn’t interrupt the democratic process term limits. Either way, Trump’s chosen judges are about to have their decisive moment.

    My hope is that they just ban him because he no longer has leverage after appointing them, but I am not sure if that would be an even worse indictment of their suitability as Supreme Court judges…

    • qantravon@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It would be possibly the most egregious thing SCOTUS has done (and they’ve done some shit) if they use this argument. We have the records of the adoption of the 14th, its original wording specified only members of the Confederacy were barred, but they explicitly changed it to cover any act of insurrection. We also know that they considered the language of “any officer” to cover the presidency because someone asked that question, and it’s in the minutes.

      • fiat_lux@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        Egregious has been escalating at the Supreme Court, in my opinion they’ve been testing the waters to see what the American public will tolerate.

        • Roe v Wade overturn showed that Americans will tolerate the removal of rights for half the population
        • the fake web designer who pretended to refuse service to LGBT+ decision showed they are willing to engage with dishonest hypothetical situations and the people will tolerate it
        • the affirmative action decision showed that when marginalised communities are further institutionally marginalised, there will be little backlash

        They’ve been steadily entrenching conservative power. Sotomayor has been warning everyone for years, but when one of the sitting judges publicly says that a decision is “unjustified exercise of power,” and the President says the court isn’t making good decisions, shit is not going well and it doesn’t give me much hope.

    • Makeitstop@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I do think that banning him is the correct legal outcome.

      However, while I think banning him is better for the country than any scenario in which he wins the election (or tries to dispute/steal it again), I think the best possible scenario in the long term would be for Trump to stay in the race, only to lose in a landslide and drag the entire Republican party down with him. The more the donors and power brokers see MAGA losing, the more they will want to shift the party away from the lunatic fringe and back to more mainstream, traditional candidates.

      And as a bonus, if the Court doesn’t neuter section 3, I’m sure we’ll see some bullshit challenges filed against Democrats, and at least in a few jurisdictions I’m sure they may even be able to score a token victory.

      • eestileib
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        11 months ago

        DeSantis would sink the Republicans much more than Trump. People just hate the guy.

        If you’re looking at this purely politically, I think Haley is the most dangerous republican in terms of being able to beat Trump.