Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label elections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elections. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Told Ya

Occam's Razor tells us our first consideration should be the obvious:

There's something wrong 
with the fucking polling.


More Trump-Haley Polling Errors

Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.

Some people I’m seeing are ascribing that to a huge amount of strategic voting by independents and Biden-supporting Dems. So it’s interesting but doesn’t mean anything. I’m not sure I totally buy that. I’m not quite sure what it means. But I don’t think I buy that it means nothing. The number of people who are willing to strategic vote is never very high. It’s hard enough to get people to vote at all, let alone vote to make a point for election observers or to own the other parties frontrunners. If that’s what it is I would say that it suggests a truly extreme amount of mobilization on the anti-Trump side.

I suspect a lot of these are either conservative-leaning independents who are voting for Haley but won’t vote for Trump in the general and true independents (move back and forth between parties) and are making a statement. Neither side can win with only its own registered partisans. You need a lot of independents. I’m going to wait until all the numbers are in to decide just what I make of this. But the mix of significant anti-Trump vote and in many cases big polling errors just don’t square with writing it off.

Counting


Trump went 14 - 1
Average margin: 45.3 points

Biden went 15 - 0
Average margin: 78.5 points

I'll say it again:
There's something wrong with the polling.

We hear practically every day
  • Biden's behind
  • Biden's got trouble inside the party
  • Biden's not popular
  • Democrats are losing the messaging war
But then people vote (the only poll that fucking matters, btw), and gosh - kinda looks like Biden's doing pretty well.


I'm not saying Biden's got it in the bag. You won't hear me say that unless he gets sworn in again next January.

So don't get cocky - remember what it was like when they called it for Trump in 2016, and get busy.

GET TOGETHER
GET TO WORK
GET SHIT DONE

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Decide


There's lots of smoke in your house, and some flames are becoming visible.

Two rather elderly firefighters show up.

Fireman Joe has a hose hooked up, ready to go, and dozens of people already working the problem.

Fireman Don has a bunch of guys with him too, and they're all carrying full cans of gasoline.

This is not a difficult choice.


SCOTUS


Kinda lost in the hubbub swirling around the court's fucked up decision to overturn the Colorado Supremes' ruling that Trump is disqualified from holding office, is the fairly simple fact that both the Colorado Supreme Court and now SCOTUS have let Judge Wallace's finding of fact stand.

ie: Donald J Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States of America.


Sunday, February 25, 2024

Scorecard

Nikki Haley lost in South Carolina yesterday, but it wasn't the rout that Trump has been blustering about for weeks.

And some interesting numbers are emerging.
  • Haley got 40% of the votes
  • 60% of her voters say they won't vote for Trump if he's the nominee
  • 60% of 40% is 25%
  • 25% of Haley's share of the SC vote is 75,000
  • Rough guess - taken countrywide, 3½ million GOP votes won't go to Trump
If we get a pretty fair turnout again this year, and if the split is roughly consistent across all the states, Trump will lose by 10,000,000 in the popular vote, and the electoral college could be something like 360-178.

And it could be a lot worse for him if he gets convicted of just about anything.

But, goddammit ...
DON'T GET COCKY
GET TOGETHER
GET TO WORK
GET SHIT DONE


Ramble Stander: a grandstander who frequently gets a little mixed up, doesn't recognize it, and just keeps talking. (a bit like Gish Gallop)



And this clip isn't of great import, but if you notice, Haley keeps giving victory speeches even as she acknowledges that she lost.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Part Of The Problem


Yes - from 6 years ago. It's not an outlier.

This is not representative government.


Since 2000, the Republican Party's share of seats won exceeded its national vote share in 11 of 12 US House of Representatives elections. The only election where the Republican Party won fewer U.S. House districts relative to its national vote share was in 2008.

During this period, the Democratic Party's share of seats won exceeded its national vote share in
7 of 12 US House elections—in 2000, 2002, 2006, 2008, 2018, 2020, and 2022.

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Win Or Lose

It can't be much fun to lose the vote to "None Of The Above".

So why is Nikki Haley willing to subject herself to all this?

She might be the most interesting aspect of this election cycle. 
  • Why is she sticking with it?
  • What's her strategy here?
  • Is the point just to be a thorn in Trump's side?
  • Is she really running for 2028?
  • Are we seeing a kind of secret revolt of the GOP Normies?


Nikki Haley suffered an embarrassing defeat in Nevada’s Republican primary.

What happened?
She lost to an option to vote for “none” of the candidates listed. Trump skipped yesterday’s non-binding contest for tomorrow’s caucuses. (See full results here)

In the Democratic primary:
Biden won decisively. It was another step toward renomination, despite concerns about his age and how he’d fare against Trump in November.

Maybe we need to talk about that headline: "...Haley suffered an embarrassing defeat..."

Why can't the Press Poodles step outside their hidebound habit of reporting only on the ground-level obvious, and seem never to dig a little deeper - to ask a few of the questions that occur to some rank-amateur-random-nobody-blogger with no training or expertise?

Monday, February 05, 2024

Bedfellows


There was a time I would've been on the same side with this lady - with a few exceptions. Of course, that was a jillion years ago when it was still OK to be a Pro-Choice Progressive Republican.

Before the GOP lost its fucking mind. Glad I'm out, and I fully expect I'll never be able to return.



The 91-year-old Republican suing to kick Donald Trump off the ballot

Norma Anderson, a trailblazing former GOP legislator, is among the Colorado voters who have challenged the Republican front-runner’s candidacy in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court


LAKEWOOD, Colo. — Norma Anderson left the Colorado legislature nearly two decades ago but she still keeps a copy of the state’s statutes in her home office. She carries a pocket Constitution in her purse. She has another copy, slightly larger with images of the Founding Fathers on the cover, that she leaves on a table in her sitting room so she can consult it when she watches TV.

She’s turned down a page corner in that copy to mark the spot where the 14th Amendment appears. She has reread it several times since joining a lawsuit last year that cites the amendment in seeking to stop Donald Trump from running for president.

Anderson, 91, is the unlikely face of a challenge to Trump’s campaign that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Thursday. She was a force in Colorado politics for decades, serving as the first female majority leader in both chambers of the legislature. She is a Republican but has long been skeptical of Trump and believes he is an insurrectionist who crossed a verboten line on Jan. 6, 2021, that should bar him from holding office again.

“He tried to overturn an election,” she said. “The very first time I ever ran, I didn’t win. I didn’t go out and try to change the election. I said, ‘Whoops, work harder next time, lady.’”

The 2024 election could turn on whether the Supreme Court agrees with Anderson and five other Republican and independent voters who persuaded Colorado’s top court to rule that Trump is ineligible to run again. The justices — three of whom were nominated by Trump — are expected to quickly decide the historic Trump v. Anderson case, with their ruling likely to apply across all 50 states.

Although considered a legal long shot, a decision in Anderson’s favor would jolt American politics by preventing the GOP front-runner from continuing his campaign. However the justices rule, they are likely to displease a large chunk of an intensely polarized electorate.

The case is built on the 14th Amendment, which was adopted three years after the end of the Civil War to guarantee rights for the formerly enslaved and to prevent former Confederates from returning to power. That latter provision, known as Section 3, is written broadly to say those who engage in insurrection after taking an oath to support the Constitution cannot hold office.

Anderson’s lawsuit, brought with the help of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), argues Trump can’t appear on Colorado’s March 5 primary ballot because he engaged in insurrection before and during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Colorado’s high court agreed in a 4-3 ruling in December, and Trump appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

Section 3 was dormant for more than a century but received new attention after Jan. 6. CREW spearheaded a lawsuit in 2022 that bounced a county commissioner in New Mexico out of office because of his role in the attack on the Capitol.

Eric Olson, an attorney for the group of Colorado voters, argues the case before the state Supreme Court in December. (David Zalubowski/AP/Pool)
The debates over whether Section 3 can block Trump from office have not always followed clean ideological lines. Some prominent conservative scholars have contended Trump should be deemed ineligible for office, even as some liberals have argued the best way to shore up democracy is to defeat Trump at the ballot box.

Polls show the country is split on whether Trump should be disqualified. The former president has called the attempts in Colorado and other states to remove him from the ballot an anti-democratic attempt to interfere with the election.

Before attorney Mario Nicolais approached Norma Anderson to be part of the lawsuit seeking to bar Trump from the ballot, he asked Pam Anderson, the 2022 Republican nominee for Colorado secretary of state. She decided not to do it but suggested Nicolais try her mother-in-law. Nicolais, a research analyst for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign who is now working with CREW, was thrilled to learn a Republican luminary might consider signing on and called Norma Anderson. She agreed on the spot.

“The short answer was ‘Yes,’” Nicolais said. “And the long answer was ‘Hell yes.’”

Also signing on to the suit were a former Republican member of Congress from Rhode Island who now lives in Colorado; a teacher; a former deputy chief of staff to a Republican governor; a former executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Larimer County; and a conservative columnist for the Denver Post.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called CREW a “front group” for Democrats that is using plaintiffs who are RINOs — Republicans in name only — to give themselves political cover. In a written statement, he noted legal efforts to kick Trump off the primary ballot in other states have failed. “We believe a fair ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States will keep President Trump on the ballot and allow the American people to re-elect him to the White House,” Cheung said.

Raised a Republican, Anderson said she was attracted to the party’s belief in fiscal restraint, personal responsibility and a strong national defense. She hosted a reception for Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona years before he became the 1964 Republican nominee for president. She oversaw Republican caucuses as a party committeewoman. And she knocked on doors to help GOP candidates long before mounting campaigns of her own.

She won a seat in the Colorado House in 1986, four years after losing her first bid. Her status as the first female majority leader means less to her, she said in an interview in her suburban Denver home, than what she considers her legislative accomplishments — creating the Colorado Transportation Department, rewriting the state’s school funding system and establishing a visiting nurse program.

During her tenure in the legislature, Anderson was considered a conservative who could work with others but knew how to get her way, said Dick Wadhams, a political consultant and former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.

“Once she decided where she was on an issue, she stuck to that,” he said. “She didn’t waver. And I think that’s one of the reasons why she was so popular at the time with Republicans, because she was strong. Nobody pushed Norma around.”

Mike Beasley, who worked with Anderson when he was the chief lobbyist for Gov. Bill Owens (R), said he had “watched her bring in the biggest bullies in politics and lock that door in her office and say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to be, boys. We’re going to work this out. We’re going to figure it out.’ And 9 out of 10 times she got her way 100 percent.”

Anderson surprised her colleagues when she abruptly quit the state Senate in 2006, a year before her term was up. She stayed active in politics but began to have reservations about a party that she believed was focusing too much on people’s personal lives.

When Trump was the party’s presidential nominee in 2016 and 2020, she voted for third-party candidates. She quit the Republican Party in 2018 because of Trump but rejoined it in 2021. “I thought, you know, I’m the Republican. They aren’t,” she said.

She said her Republican friends have supported her decision to join the lawsuit. “There’s other Republicans that think I’m a RINO,” Anderson said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

The justices on Colorado’s top court faced a wave of threats after they issued their ruling, as did Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) after she decided Trump should be kept off the ballot in her state. (Bellows’s decision was put on hold by a state court until the Supreme Court decides the Colorado case.)

Anderson said she knew she could face harassment when she signed up for the lawsuit but would not be deterred. “I don’t frighten very easily,” she said.

Krista Kafer, a Denver Post columnist who is another plaintiff, studied up on the case, prayed about it and consulted with her mother before deciding to join the lawsuit. She said she did so in part because she would want Democrats to do the same if a leader of their party did what Trump did after losing an election. And if Trump isn’t barred from running, she said, future presidents may incite violence if they lose their reelection bids.

“Only this time it’s not going to be, you know, a guy with Viking horns and a bunch of people with poles and makeshift weapons,” she said. “If this becomes the new normal, what does the next one look like? Bigger crowd, better weapons.”

Friends have been supportive, but some acquaintances have cut ties with her because of the lawsuit, she said. A neighbor told her she was worried she would go to hell. Others have taken to social media to label her, variously, a Nazi, a communist, a Satanist and a RINO.

Kafer left the Republican Party when Trump became the nominee in 2016 and voted for a third-party candidate that year. In 2020, she said, she reluctantly voted for Trump, figuring he was better than Joe Biden. She said she was horrified when Trump refused to concede and relentlessly repeated lies about the election that fueled the attack on the Capitol.

Part of what brought her back to the Republican Party during Trump’s time in office was his appointment of conservatives to the bench. She said she thought Democrats treated Brett M. Kavanaugh unfairly when they considered his nomination to the Supreme Court by focusing on allegations, which he strenuously denied, that he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when both were teenagers.

Now, Kavanaugh will be among the justices hearing the case about Trump’s future, as will the other two Trump nominees, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Kafer is not worried they’ll be swayed by who nominated them, saying she views the justices as fair brokers.

“They love the Constitution and they love the country, and they also know they’re under a microscope,” she said. “Anything that’s human is flawed, but the Supreme Court seems to me to be the most functional part of our system right now in that you don’t see them bad-mouth each other. They don’t tweet.”

Another justice, Clarence Thomas, has faced calls to recuse himself from cases involving Trump because his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, urged the Trump White House and lawmakers to overturn the election.

Anderson said she understood she might lose the case, but believed that bringing the lawsuit was worth it regardless.

Either way, she said, the challenge will help more people “realize how serious January 6th was and the fact that dear Donald was part of it.”

Thursday, February 01, 2024

Vote Them Out



Opinion
The GOP’s blunders take their toll

House Republicans who have become indifferent to the adverse consequences of nihilism and performative politics might want to consider the toll their chaos-producing antics are taking. From vowing to pursue meritless impeachments to nixing a border security measure to please former president Donald Trump, they have given Democrats plenty of ammunition to blast them out of the majority in November.

Republicans, by the admission of conservative Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.), have not a single accomplishment on which to run this year. “For the life of me, I do not understand how you can go to the trouble of campaigning, raising money, going to events, talking to people, coming to this town as a member of a party who allegedly stands for something … and then do nothing about it,” he bellowed on the House floor in November. “One thing: I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” He got no answer.

Most Republicans voted against the overwhelmingly popular infrastructure bill. Now they routinely claim credit for it. Only occasionally do they get called out for hypocrisy. (Get ready to hear plenty of it as the campaign heats up.) With help from some Republicans in the Senate and very few in the House, Democrats were able to pass the infrastructure bill in 2021. As with infrastructure, Republicans have largely escaped blame for causing economic havoc thanks to Democratic votes for keeping the government open and avoiding a default on the debt.

Now, however, with no one to cover their tracks, Republicans risk making themselves vulnerable to voters disgusted with partisan melodrama. On the impeachment front, Republicans embarrassingly have come up with nothing to justify the impeachments of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas or President Biden. As for Mayorkas, Republicans’ favorite lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in the Daily Beast that “being a bad person is not impeachable — or many cabinets would be largely empty,” nor is doing a bad job. He added that if poor performance were grounds for impeachment, Mayorkas “would be only the latest in a long line of cabinet officers frog-marched into Congress for constitutional termination.”

Norman Eisen, former impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, along with Democracy 21 founder Fred Wertheimer and researcher Sasha Matsuki, wrote for MSNBC: “Both the Biden and Mayorkas impeachments are clearly not backed up by evidence. … What really concerns us, though, is the way these impeachments will both weaponize a key constitutional remedy and undermine its sober original intent.” In turning impeachment into a “partisan joke” to satisfy four-times-indicted and twice-impeached Trump, they wind up revealing their own recklessness, irresponsibility and deep dishonesty. When Turley, a fierce defender of Trump during his impeachments, and Eisen, a counsel to House impeachment managers, agree these are baseless stunts, the jig might be up for Republicans.

Making matters worse, House and Senate Republicans’ objection to a massive funding bill to secure the border — to make Mayorkas’s job easier — only underscores their cynical disinterest in actually securing the border. Even for some Republicans, this is a bridge too far. “I didn’t come here to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said last week. “It is immoral for me to think you looked the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) denounced Republicans’ obstructionism as well. “The border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem — because he wants to blame Biden for it — is really appalling,” Romney said. “The American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, save that problem! Don’t solve it! Let me take credit for solving it later.’”

Put differently, Republicans’ brazen objection to arguably the most serious border funding measure in decades makes both their Mayorkas impeachment and caterwauling about the border look absurdly cynical, even for them.

Unsurprisingly, the public is not buying any of it. Last year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that, concerning Biden, “while overwhelming shares of Republicans support impeachment and Democrats oppose it, independents on the whole side with the opponents, the poll found, with 51% against impeachment and 37% in favor.” As my Post colleague Aaron Blake found in a December review of polling that showed meager support for impeachment, “If the poll numbers don’t move significantly toward where they were for Trump’s impeachments (and are now for his indictments), a Biden impeachment vote could be tricky for a lot of Republicans — and for GOP leadership. And failing to even hold a vote would be a remarkable capitulation.”

Matters have not improved for Republicans. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll in January found, “Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden could be costing them with voters, particularly with America’s moderates. About twice as many of these middle-of-the-road voters — a crucial bloc for both parties in this year’s presidential election — said they oppose rather than support the House GOP’s recent impeachment inquiry.”

Republicans overwhelmingly were against Biden’s popular infrastructure bill and in favor of shutting down the government, defaulting on the debt and conducting bogus impeachment hearings that the voters do not want while opposing a tough border control bill. Democrats can hardly believe their good fortune heading into November. Chip Roy likely will not be the only one who cannot think of a single reason to keep them in power.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

The Race Is On

So Trump won in Iowa yesterday, and for the most part, the reaction has been a mix of:
  • Yeah, so what? He'll be in prison by Labor Day, and then I'll have the excuse I need to stop acting so stupid
  • I'm not goin' out there in this weather
  • Of course Trump won - it's rigged
  • Yay - Trump's still popular, so I'm still popular by proxy

Trump won in all but 1 county, and even though DeSantis took 2nd overall, Haley finished 2nd in 20 counties, winning outright in Johnson County of them (something DeSantis didn't manage).

The campaigns spent $123 million on this thing, which works out to almost $1,150 per vote.

11% of all Iowa Republicans, including almost half of Haley voters, say they'll vote for Joe Biden if Trump is the nominee.

There's nothing that sats we can extrapolate that across the board to show Biden's got the edge, but it might be helpful to keep it mind as we try to decipher polling (which is IMO pretty fucked up to begin with).

Anyway - no matter what - get out and vote dammit.

Monday, January 15, 2024

Where's My Voter Frauds At?

Big discrepancy uncovered in Prince William County Virginia in the 2020 election!

Biden was stiffed out of 1,648 votes
Trump was over-counted by 2,327 votes,
giving him a margin of 3,975 votes -
and he still fucking lost.

Trump.
Still.
LOST.





Saturday, January 06, 2024

Will SCOTUS Step Up?


Jennifer Rubin

Opinion
You can bet on the Supreme Court’s abject partisanship

Happy new year! To start us off in 2024, I will look at the Supreme Court’s constitutional conundrum, pick the distinguished person of the week and share my thoughts on two movies.

What caught my eye

By any objective reading of the Constitution, four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump should be disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court will have a hard time reversing the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision applying Section 3, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.

The president is undoubtedly an “officer” under Section 3. (That the word “officer” is used to refer to subordinate appointees in the appointments clause in the body of the Constitution is utterly irrelevant to its use more than 150 years later to protect the Union from former Confederates.) In any event, the phrase “hold any office” sweeps in the presidency. (As the Colorado Supreme Court noted: “The Constitution refers to the Presidency as an ‘Office’ twenty-five times.”)

The Colorado court’s evidentiary hearing also confirmed that Trump had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same [the Constitution], or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Its exacting discussion on pages 97-103 of its ruling reiterated that “the record amply established that the events of January 6 constituted a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish the peaceful transfer of power in this country. Under any viable definition, this constituted an insurrection.”

In addition, contrary to Trump apologists, there is no requirement in the text requiring a conviction before the disqualification. Had the framers intended to make that a precondition, they surely would have said so. (The conviction of former Confederates was not a required under Section 3.)

And finally, arguments that the 14th Amendment is not “self-executing” (i.e., requiring an act of Congress) are plain wrong. Individuals routinely bring suits directly under the due-process and equal-protection clauses of Section 1. As with Section 1, Congress may write enforcement legislation for Section 3, but none is necessary.

An honest originalist would be compelled to agree with the Colorado Supreme Court. Our democracy disallows certain candidates for president — e.g., foreign-born people, insurrectionists. As constitutional scholar Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “I have got a colleague who’s a great young politician, Maxwell Frost. He’s 26. He can’t run for president. Now, would we say that that’s undemocratic? Well, that’s the rules of the Constitution. If you don’t like the rules of the Constitution, change the Constitution.” If the Constitution is to mean anything, originalists tell us, its text must be followed even if the outcome is politically dicey. (Certainly, allowing an insurrectionist back on the ballot to do it again would be more problematic.)

And yet, few expect the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority, so profoundly lacking in credibility, to follow Section 3’s clear mandate, any more than they expect Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself, given his wife’s alleged involvement in the coup plot. How, then, do the justices get out of doing what the Constitution says they must?

First, the Supreme Court could concoct some novel definition of “insurrection” so it can categorize the attempted coup as something less than the “insurrection” Section 3 requires. Despite the Colorado court’s ample historical research demonstrating that Trump’s action fits squarely within the word’s meaning, the right-wing justices could simply make up a new definition. I would not put it past them.

Second, the court could duck the case on the grounds that it lacks jurisdiction to contravene a state’s ruling on qualifications for a primary, essentially putting off a decision until Trump becomes the Republican nominee. That said, very few court watchers expect the majority would countenance a hodgepodge of conflicting rulings, with some states allowing him on the ballot and others not. (By the way, unleashing utter chaos among states is precisely what the court did on abortion, but this court is no model of consistency.)

Finally, a related argument would be that states alone have the duty to determine qualifications. The only federal role comes when Congress can challenge electors. “Under Article II, Section 1, each state is authorized to appoint presidential electors ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,’” Colorado’s Supreme Court noted. “Absent a separate constitutional constraint, then, states may exercise their plenary appointment power to limit presidential ballot access to those candidates who are constitutionally qualified to hold the office of President.” Those enamored with the (rejected) independent state legislature doctrine might agree, but I suspect this partisan majority will not allow any state to exclude Trump from the ballot.

Bottom line:
The partisan majority on the court could duck the question, deeming it premature or a matter for the states, thereby enraging their right-wing patrons, though that is highly unlikely. Alternatively, it could fashion a definition of insurrection to suit its purposes or blatantly defy Section 3’s clear language (e.g., invent a requirement for a criminal conviction). Right-wing justices’ contortions will confirm the utter lack of credibility that now defines the court.

- more -

Friday, January 05, 2024

SCOTUS Takes A Hand

Let's just say the Roberts Court will probably be looking to carve this thing down to the sliveriest sliver that anybody ever saw.

Did you ever play Mumbly Peg with a guy who was bound and determined to make you eat dirt? Yeah - kinda like that.

Conventional wisdom says Roberts has to protect the court's already-damaged public image. And maybe that's what carries the day, and we'll get a ruling that's "true to the Originalist view". Which means the 14th amendment stands as written, and Trump can't be president.

That's what makes the most sense to me. The trial court in Colorado found, on the facts, that Trump did engage in an insurrection, and left it to the CO Supreme Court (which affirmed the lower court's finding as to the facts) to decide on the law - that Section 3 of A14 means Trump can't be on the ballot.


My first guess is that they'll weasel their way into a 5-4 decision that "let's the voters decide".

I think Roberts would have to be that 4th vote on the dissenting side, which would pretty much tar him permanently as a Chief Justice In Name Only.


Supreme Court says it will decide if Trump qualifies for Colorado ballot

The Supreme Court said Friday it will decide whether former President Donald Trump’s name can appear on primary-election ballots, a case that ensures the justices will play a central role in shaping this year’s presidential election.

The decision to review the case from Colorado at oral argument in early February comes after that state’s top court disqualified the Republican frontrunner, finding Trump engaged in an insurrection before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Friday’s announcement puts the justices in a pivotal, potentially uncomfortable position with echoes of the court’s involvement in the 2000 election when its decision assured victory for President George W. Bush, polarized the nation and damaged the court’s reputation as an independent institution.

The court’s brief order scheduled oral argument for Feb. 8, and came the day before the third anniversary of the Capitol riot.

Legal scholars and state election officials have urged the court to quickly settle the question of Trump’s eligibility as a candidate and to ensure all states follow the same policy ahead of this year’s primary voting. Trump holds a wide lead over other Republican contenders, with the Iowa caucus less than two weeks away and state primaries starting Jan. 23.

The Colorado decision was the first time a court found a presidential candidate could be barred from the ballot because of a provision of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment. The provision prevents insurrectionists from holding office and was designed to keep Confederates from returning to power.

Aye there's the rub - the Thomas/Alito faction could bail on a "traditional originalist view" (I don't know what the fuck that might means, I just made it up - you think any of this is following any kinda logical pattern?).

Anyway, they push it all the way down to a decision not to make a decision, because the original intent of the authors of A14 was to bar Confederates from returning to Congress. It had nothing to do with a sitting POTUS. It doesn't apply.

Hey - ya heard it here first.


Similar arguments have been made to keep Trump off the ballot elsewhere. While those challenges have failed in some states, like Michigan and Minnesota, they are pending in Illinois, Oregon, Massachusetts and elsewhere. Maine’s top election official last month barred Trump from that state’s ballot, an order Trump has appealed in state court.

Both Colorado and Maine temporarily put their decisions to bar Trump as a candidate on hold, meaning the former president’s name will stay on the primary ballots until the legal issues are resolved. Colorado and Maine hold primaries on March 5, but ballots are printed — and mailed to military and overseas voters — weeks before then.

The public already views the Supreme Court through a partisan lens, with Democrats expressing little confidence in the court and Republicans saying the opposite, and the question of whether Trump should be kept off the ballot has the potential to further polarize those views.

“It throws them right into the political thicket,” Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell said of the court. “There is no way they can decide the case without having about half the country think they are being partisan hacks.”

In part for that reason, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., an ardent institutionalist, is likely to look for consensus through a narrow ruling that seeks unanimity or avoids a partisan split on a court with a 6-3 conservative majority that includes three justices nominated by Trump.

Constitutional scholars are divided on whether it would be good for democracy to bar Trump from the ballot, or whether such a move, even if legally sound, is politically too dangerous. Many of them say they expect the justices to try to find a way to decide the case without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump engaged in insurrection.

The justices have several paths to resolve the case in a way that keeps Trump’s name on the ballot without dealing with the question of insurrection.

In urging the justices to invalidate the Colorado decision, and give voters the opportunity to select the candidate of their choosing, the former president’s lawyers and the Colorado Republican Party have made multiple arguments. States, they say, have no authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment without the passage of federal legislation. They also contend that Section 3 applies to those who took oaths to serve in Congress or a state legislature, but not to serve as president. In addition, Trump’s lawyers say he did not engage in an insurrection.

If a majority of justices agree with Trump on any one of those arguments, the court could allow the former president’s name to remain on the ballot.

Attorneys for the six Colorado voters who challenged Trump’s eligibility have said the Constitution’s language barring insurrectionists from office is clear; that it applies to presidents; and does not require an act of Congress to be enforced. They urged the justices in a filing Thursday to abide by the finding from Colorado’s top court that the former president intentionally incited his supporters to violence on Jan. 6, 2021, to disrupt the certification of the election — and exacerbated the attack while it was ongoing.

Of the nine sitting justices, only Justice Clarence Thomas was on the bench when the court issued its 2000 decision about the vote count in Florida in Bush v. Gore. But his colleagues are certainly mindful of the lasting impact the ruling had on the court’s image.

Years after she retired, the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for one, expressed misgivings that the court had gotten involved in the case, acknowledging the ruling “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”

“No doubt they have learned some lessons from that," said McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge. “They do not want to be in a position where they look like they’ve decided an American election.”

Wednesday, January 03, 2024

Wrong, And Behaving Stoopidly

... but they're pretty consistent.

Biden won
because got almost 8 million legit
votes more than Trump


A right-wing tale of Michigan election fraud had it all – except proof

Gateway Pundit, a favorite news source of former president Donald Trump’s, has pushed false claims of a stolen election even as others have pulled back in the face of consequences


The story had all the elements of a blockbuster crime saga: burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. “Massive 2020 Voter Fraud Uncovered in Michigan.”

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The story referenced “thousands of fraudulent ballots” caught by Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch. Grateful readers deluged her office with hundreds of calls, hailing her as a hero.

But Meisch knew it wasn’t true.

According to police reports, the Michigan attorney general’s office and an interview with Meisch, an employee of a voter registration drive company had submitted to the Muskegon city clerk thousands of voter registration applications weeks before the 2020 election, some with faked signatures and faulty addresses.

Meisch’s staff spent hundreds of hours weeding out the bad applications. The guns the police found were legally registered to a landlord who had nothing to do with the registration drive. The prepaid phones and cash cards were given to temporary employees to contact new voter prospects.

“There were no fraudulent ballots,” Meisch said in an interview, “not a single one that anyone in my office was aware of.”

But for Gateway Pundit, which is run out of its founder’s home and whose small staff produces stories that help set the agenda for Donald Trump’s most ardent followers, the August story provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers. That’s despite the fact that it was published nearly three years after the election — and after Meisch’s staff had thwarted any fraud.

The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable, despite the many efforts to halt the spread of disinformation and impose consequences on those who persist in it.

Election challengers demand to enter a room to observe the counting of absentee ballots in Detroit on Nov. 4, 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Trump himself faces multiple criminal counts for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election on the disproven grounds that it had been rigged against him. The Trump lawyers who pushed false voter fraud claims have, in some cases, been hit with criminal charges, as well as censure and disbarment proceedings. In mid-December, a federal jury ordered former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two election workers who sued him for defamation. Trump’s largest media ally, Fox News, agreed last year to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation suit.

Some right-wing outlets, such as Fox’s smaller cable-news rival Newsmax, have pulled back from election-related conspiracy theories in the face of lawsuits and threats of legal consequences.

But through it all, Gateway Pundit has continued trumpeting disproven election fraud stories, even as it faces defamation suits over its coverage of the 2020 election. It has also taken its own legal action against fact-checkers, disinformation researchers and story subjects, while pressing in court to make it harder for social media companies to crack down on misinformation.

The outlet’s reporting was a favorite of Trump’s as he clung to the presidency more than three years ago, aides said, and it has become a key amplifier of his continued fraud claims as he campaigns to return to the White House. Gateway Pundit traffic peaked in November 2020 at nearly 7 million page views, and the site still averages more than a million visits each month, according to Comscore, which measures the readership of media sites.

Less than a year from the 2024 election, the latest polls show that some two-thirds of Republicans falsely believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Gateway Pundit’s influence helps explain why, experts in disinformation say. Though the site employs only a handful of regular writers, it has played an outsize role in popularizing false claims.

“Gateway Pundit is a known source of disinformation that quickly trades up the chain,” said Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University studying online disinformation and media manipulation. “Because when they report a piece of information, it gives others license to do so.”

The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, who started blogging as a hobby in 2004, is among “the best at creating a right-wing echo system,” right-wing podcast host and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said in an interview. Hoft did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this report.

Bannon said Hoft is often one of the first to pick up a social media post or a local news story that other right-wing personalities then repeat and aggregate. He “isn’t afraid to take a leading edge where you don’t have all the facts but they are coming together,” Bannon explained. Once Gateway Pundit puts one of its signature all-caps headlines on a story, that provides what Bannon calls an “infrastructure” upon which his own podcast and other right-wing outlets and influencers can build.

Stephen K. Bannon, left, with Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, center, and Gary Bauer, then a host on SiriusXM radio, in 2016. (Ben Jackson/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
That infrastructure was useful to pro-Trump One America News, a small cable network that pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. A former OAN producer attested that he and his colleagues were directed to consult Gateway Pundit when they arrived at work to inform the day’s programming, according to depositions and documents from a defamation lawsuit filed against the Trump campaign and others, including Gateway Pundit, by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive who was falsely accused by Trump allies of helping to swing the 2020 election.

“Check Gateway Pundit, Epoch Times and The Blaze right when you get in. … These are very helpful to find good OAN content,” read one Jan. 14, 2021, email to producers from the channel’s news director. OAN settled in the case under undisclosed terms in September.

“Gateway Pundit’s articles were chopped-up sentences that were drawn from whatever crazy thing a Twitter user was saying about election denial,” the former producer, Marty Golingan, said in an interview, “and they would spin it with maximum outrage and reactionary emotion.”

In the weeks before he left office in 2021, Trump brandished printouts of Gateway Pundit articles questioning the results of the election, say former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House conversations.

“When he was looking for evidence, Gateway Pundit was one reliable place he knew he could go for validation, and maybe even some new ideas,” said one former aide.

The site has been influential in promoting false election fraud theories even though some of the most influential figures on the right say they don’t trust it. One prominent conservative radio host, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending political allies, said in an interview that the site’s stories are “bull----.”

Gateway Pundit represents a “a fringe segment of so-called conservative media that’s driven by conspiratorial clickbait to drive revenues to stay afloat,” the host said.

A former Trump administration official who denies that Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election nevertheless told The Post in an interview that if you cite Gateway Pundit in an argument, “it means you’ve lost. You can’t use it to make an argument. You can only use it to hear what you want to hear.”

Gateway’s origins


In the nearly two decades since its founding, Hoft’s website has spread debunked conspiracy theories on a wide range of topics — for instance, casting doubt on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and suggesting that student survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school shooting were part of an anti-Trump plot. More recently, Gateway Pundit has helped spread misinformation about the attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was bludgeoned in the couple’s San Francisco home last year by an intruder intent on kidnapping his wife. It has also falsely claimed that U.S. aid money for Ukraine is being laundered and going into the pockets of Democrats.

But the site’s most notable focus in recent years has been promoting disproven narratives about election fraud.

Hoft created Gateway Pundit in 2004, inspired by the role that bloggers played in debunking a “60 Minutes” segment on George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, according to former associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. Bloggers had been the first to point out that “60 Minutes” had unwittingly relied on falsified records in telling its story; CBS ultimately retracted the piece.

Hoft, 60, rarely grants interviews. But years ago, the Iowa native described in a message posted online ahead of a high school reunion how he started the site.

“So much has happened since I left Fort Dodge,” Hoft began his note to his former classmates at a Catholic school, explaining that “something exciting happened in late 2004. I started writing a little political blog” that, after a few years, “gained thousands of readers every day.”

The work started getting him invited on “paid trips to different conservative events around the world,” Hoft wrote, including a 2007 visit to Israel sponsored by a conservative political group. There he met Andrew Breitbart, who at the time was an editor at the Drudge Report. The two became friends and developed an appreciation for the power of the internet to take a small ember of a story and turn it into a conflagration.

“Jim is a direct descendant of Andrew Breitbart,” Bannon said, referencing the founder of the right-wing media site Breitbart News. “Remember, they’re both about citizen journalism, and Jim knows how to harness the energy of regular citizens.”

Trump’s candidacy was a boon for Hoft and for Gateway Pundit, which, according to a study conducted by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, became one of the most popular sites on the right in 2015-2016. Among those sites, the study found, “Gateway Pundit is in a class of its own, known for ‘publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.’”

In 2020, Gateway Pundit became a key part of what researchers at the University of Washington and Stanford University among others deemed a “disinformation campaign” produced by “hyperpartisan media and political operatives” working “alongside ordinary people to produce and amplify misleading claims.”

Instead of operating from the top down, this kind of campaign seizes on the social media posts of “concerned citizens” and turns them into shareable pieces of content that can spread to different outlets and to powerful influencers, the researchers found.

In one illustrative example given in the study, Gateway Pundit helped circulate a photo posted on Twitter by a writer for conservative outlet the Blaze in September 2020. The photo purported to show 1,000 mail-in ballots found in a dumpster in Sonoma County, Calif.

“Big if true,” read the caption. Five hours later, Gateway Pundit weighed in with this headline: “EXCLUSIVE: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up.”

The county responded in a Facebook post: “This is not true.” Instead, the county said, the photo depicted old ballot envelopes from the November 2018 election that had been discarded in accordance with California law.

Gateway Pundit updated its story after the post: “The County of Sonoma put out a statement saying the ballots were from 2018. The county says the ballots were already opened. You can judge for yourself.”

In May, Hoft, alongside a co-director of a coronavirus vaccine skeptics group, sued the researchers, alleging that the entities colluded to “censor” speech by sharing their research with social media platforms as part of an attempted crackdown on misinformation. A representative for Stanford said the case, which is in its early stages, is “completely without merit.” A representative for the University of Washington declined to speak about ongoing litigation.

Election workers under threat

People wait to cast their absentee ballots in person at a senior center in Sterling Heights, Mich., on Nov. 2, 2020, the day before Election Day. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Gateway Pundit enjoyed a social-media-fueled traffic spike similar to the one it had during the 2016 election. A German Marshall Fund analysis found that “verified account shares of its content” on Twitter increased ninefold from the first quarter of 2018 through the fourth quarter of 2020, reaching 7.2 million shares, more than for The Washington Post, NBC News or NPR. Nine of its 10 most-shared articles “included disinformation about voter fraud,” the analysis found.

One of Gateway Pundit’s highest-profile stories of 2020 was published after a volunteer Trump campaign attorney presented a misleading video during a post-election hearing in Georgia. The video purported to show that Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, her daughter, had tampered with ballots.

That day, Gateway Pundit published the first of 58 articles on the two women that would appear over the next year and a half, despite the fact that Georgia election officials had quickly debunked claims that the pair had engaged in election fraud. Gateway Pundit’s stories cast Freeman and Moss as “crooked” operatives who counted “illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!”

In 2021, the women sued Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft and Hoft’s twin brother, Joe, who is a frequent contributor to the site. Gateway Pundit and Jim and Joe Hoft filed a counterclaim, alleging that the case against them is designed to drive Gateway Pundit out of business. The counterclaim was dismissed in 2023.

The lawsuit by Freeman and Moss, which is awaiting trial, alleges that the falsehoods about them “have not only devastated their personal and professional reputations but instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety.”

In their response, the Hofts said articles in Gateway Pundit about Freeman and Moss were “either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.”

A federal jury recently ordered that Giuliani pay the two women $148 million for his own false claims that they helped steal the election from Trump. His lawyer, Joseph D. Sibley IV, told jurors that Gateway Pundit had been “patient zero” for the false claims.

Not a smoking gun

Meisch, the Muskegon city clerk, fears she may come under the same kind of attack when people learn that she doesn’t believe she uncovered massive voter fraud in her city.

“I’m just worried people will turn on me,” she said.

Gateway Pundit’s Aug. 8 story about Muskegon, a formerly booming foundry town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan that Trump narrowly lost in 2016 and 2020, outlined a purported voter fraud conspiracy. The report was built on a police investigation that had been reported on three years earlier by local news outlets. The police had found no evidence of a broader effort to subvert the election, but referred the case to the FBI because the voter registration company at the center of the case was based out of state. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

Gateway Pundit published a copy of the 2020 police report, which contained new details about the investigation, including that police had found guns in the storefront that the voter registration company had rented. Almost immediately after publication, other right-wing outlets picked up and amplified the piece. The same day the story was published, Bannon hosted Hoft on his daily podcast to discuss it. Over the next two days, then-Fox News host Lou Dobbs, conservative podcaster Joe Oltmann and Right Side Broadcasting, a pro-Trump streaming service, cited the story.

Dobbs called it a guide to “how the Marxist Dems stole Michigan.” Oltmann said the gun silencers were evidence “of organized crime.” Bannon said the story showed that “demon” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, was a “liar.”

For the next 10 days, Gateway Pundit averaged a story a day on the topic, eventually publishing at least 40 pieces. During that period, an array of right-wing podcasters all discussed the story on their shows, including former Fox personality Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, a far-right blogger.

Twelve days after the initial story was published, the Michigan attorney general’s office issued a statement responding to the report, citing its “false claims of election law violations.”

“Despite Gateway Pundit’s continuing claims to the contrary, the 2020 election has been thoroughly litigated and audited and has been proven well beyond a reasonable doubt that it was fair and accurate,” the statement read.

The voter-registration company employee who had handed in the faked registration applications to the clerk’s office had not filled them out herself; she was responsible for collecting the registration forms from many employees and submitting them in batches, according to Nessel’s office. Voters registration in Michigan are nonpartisan.

The state attorney general’s office said that while it had not ruled out that a crime may have been committed in Muskegon, numerous state agencies had investigated and none had uncovered evidence of successful fraudulent registrations because they had all been “intercepted and not filed into the state’s voter database.”

“This is once again, not a smoking gun for their long-debunked theories,” the statement read.

But Gateway Pundit was unbowed. The same day, the site published another piece on Muskegon and Hoft appeared on Bannon’s podcast again, calling Nessel’s statement “confirmation” of the Gateway Pundit story.

On Sept. 5, Trump posted about the story on Truth Social, without comment, and was reposted 3,300 times.

In late August, the Michigan Republican Party held a news conference in Lansing, the state capital, that party Chairwoman Kristina Karamo billed as an opportunity to “address the recent reports of election corruption uncovered in Michigan.”

“The constant questions surrounding our election system is an absolute threat to our republic,” Karamo said. “No one is going to continue to convince us that these are all just a bunch of anomalies.”

Gateway Pundit “slanted the story to make it seem that the attempt to interfere with the election was successful,” Karen Buie, the Muskegon County clerk, said in an interview. “There was an attempt. You can’t negate that. But it failed because we have systems in place.”

Meisch, the city clerk, said in an interview that she is bracing for even more mistrust of the system that she has worked for over 30 years to protect. Already, she said, paranoia among voters has been growing as baseless conspiracy theories spread about voting machines and drop boxes.

“We haven’t yet seen the full impact of the Gateway Pundit story,” said Meisch. “We won’t see that until the next [presidential] election.”

But for Gateway Pundit, the impact is already apparent. In July, the month before the Muskegon story, the site’s traffic fell below 700,000 unique visitors for the first time in years, according to Comscore.

In August, it more than doubled, to 1.5 million.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

SCOTUS Here We Come


Now all we have to do is figure the over/under
for how much Clarence Thomas 
is gonna make outa this.


Wednesday, December 06, 2023

Today's Keith

No fair remembering stuff! (thanks, Professional Left)

Trump's ravings about "rigged elections" did not start in 2020, or 2016 - Olbermann chronicles that shit all the way back to 2012.


Friday, November 24, 2023


We're told that publicly disclosed campaign money is a determinant factor in an election. And there's still some truth to that, but this is not 2009 (ie: before Citizens United v FEC), and we've drifted away from being the kind of democracy we keep telling ourselves we are.

Press Poodles need to start looking beyond what a candidate (particularly a GOP candidate) has in their "campaign war chest".

Any given Republican running for any given office can be pretty sure that whatever they spend on ads and such will be supplemented 3- or 5- or 10-fold by private (and anonymous) "donors" who are basically buying that candidate's vote at whatever level of government they're going to "serve".

And while there's a good bit of that on the Dems' side as well, I estimate a very large majority of it goes to the benefit of the GOP.

Friday, November 17, 2023

Today's WTF

The judge in Denver found that Trump did indeed engage in an insurrection, but somehow, she opines that doesn't disqualify him under the 14th amendment.

A face that will live in infamy
WTF, lady!?!

I think I kinda get it. Sometimes, the courts are saying "You guys in the legislature have to fix this shit so we can help you", but goddamn - this sounds like such a fucking cop out.


Donald Trump can appear on Colorado’s 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot, judge rules

Similar lawsuits have been filed in other parts of the country, none of which have been successful


Donald Trump incited an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but he can still appear on the Republican presidential primary ballot in Colorado next year, a Denver District Court judge ruled Friday in a case that could have national consequences.

Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s 102-page ruling comes in a lawsuit filed by a liberal political nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. It argued that Trump’s role in the deadly Jan. 6 riot disqualifies him from running for president under the 14th Amendment and that he shouldn’t be allowed to appear on Colorado’s presidential primary ballot.

Section 3 of the amendment bars “officers of the Unites States” who took an “oath … to support the Constitution of the United States” and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from holding federal or state office again.

Wallace found that while Trump “incited an insurrection … and therefore ‘engaged’ in an insurrection,” the 14th Amendment “does not apply to Trump” because he is not an “officer” of the United States.

“Part of the court’s decision is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent of Section Three,” she wrote.

Sorry not sorry, but saying Trump isn't "an officer of the government" may be true now - on Nov 17, 2023 - but on Jan6 he was President Of The United Fucking States. So your whole premise is total fucking bullshit.

Wallace’s ruling came after she heard five days of testimony, including from police officers who were at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, two congressmen and constitutional experts.

While Trump is unlikely to win the general election in Colorado in 2024 if he is the GOP nominee — he lost to President Joe Biden, a Democrat, by 13 percentage points in the state in 2020 — the ballot-access case could still have major consequences on the national stage.

The nonprofit that brought the lawsuit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which doesn’t disclose its donors, is likely to appeal the ruling. The Colorado GOP, which fought the lawsuit, said it expects Wallace’s finding to be challenged.

Legal experts believe the questions of whether Trump should be allowed to run for president again will eventually land before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Similar lawsuits have been filed in other parts of the country, none of which have been successful.

On Tuesday, Michigan Court of Claims Judge James Redford said deciding whether an event constituted “a rebellion or insurrection and whether or not someone participated in it” are questions best left to Congress and not “one single judicial officer.” A judge, he wrote, “cannot in any manner or form possibly embody the represented qualities of every citizen of the nation — as does the House of Representatives and the Senate.”

Last week, Minnesota’s Supreme Court rejected another effort to block Trump from appearing on Minnesota’s GOP primary ballot next year.

The Colorado lawsuit was brought on behalf of a group of Republican and unaffiliated voters. The defendant was Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat whose office took a neutral stance on the case.

“The court determined that Donald Trump is eligible to be placed on the Colorado ballot in the March presidential primary,” Griswold said in a written statement on Friday. “This decision may be appealed. As secretary of state, I will always ensure that every voter can make their voice heard in free and fair elections.”

Colorado’s presidential primary will be held March 4.

Aaaaaargh!!!