This is very clever and I follow the reasoning. But if congress has already found trump unqualified (as you say, with their majority votes in 2021) why would the court say Colorado was in error to remove him? Your parsing of their language might be logically correct but if this had been the courts intention, wouldn’t that have added “and…
This is very clever and I follow the reasoning. But if congress has already found trump unqualified (as you say, with their majority votes in 2021) why would the court say Colorado was in error to remove him? Your parsing of their language might be logically correct but if this had been the courts intention, wouldn’t that have added “and congress has already so found” to the end of their opinion? I don’t understand how this could be actionable. The court will just swat it down again.
Do they contradict themselves? Then they contradict themselves. You have to look no further than bush v gore to see that the court is perfectly capable of that.
Great question, Sam! And the answer is one that will sound coy but is really not: SCOTUS established this new legal framework *via Anderson*, so it could not have been raised by anyone prior to just a few days ago. In other words, the Anderson litigants did not (and could not) have raised it in their filings, as they did not know SCOTUS would respond to those filings, as it did a few days ago, by establishing a new legal framework that can only work if Trump was already disqualified from federal office as of February 2021.
This also explains why SCOTUS did not address it: it was way, way outside anything in the *filings* in Anderson. While SCOTUS did of course go beyond the question those filings established—the "single question" the Court acknowledged was before it—we could not *also* say that the Court needed to argue over interpretation of a legal framework it was *at that moment establishing*. We do not require the Court to argue with itself; we expect litigants to do so in response to rulings and that is just what should happen here.
That doesn’t make sense though. They then finished their finding by saying Colorado was “in error”. That is exactly “applying the framework that we’re in the moment establishing”. They answered the one question - and then acted on the answer.
If they’d wanted to, they could have said something like “in the matter of who can enforce (the one matter before them) we find only congress can. Since congress has already acted via the 2021 votes, we find that Colorado’s action is valid and stands, not because they had the right to decide as a state, but because congress has decided already”. But they didn’t do that. They settled the issue at hand *and* applied it to Colorado (as you might say, incorrectly but hey, what’s a little contradiction among us supremes, amiright?)
The USSC appears not to have considered all relevant facts; to wit, they failed to grok their decision to lower threshold for disability to hold office to majority vote in Congress opened the door for the previously recorded majority votes on Trump's second impeachment proceeding in Congress for inciting an insurrection. It seems that simple.
I’d love y’all to be right about this, believe me. It just seems highly unlikely that none of the 9 justices contemplated this during the period of review. Perhaps one or two of the liberal justices did and kept their mouths shut but it amounts to the same thing - the majority will just say “nah, didn’t mean that, move on” if someone tries to call them on it. They meant to say he gets to stay on the ballot, and they said it. It would be nice to think we could hold them accountable for all of the implications of their words but we can’t. Cf the ethics mess with Thomas.
In Bush v Gore they basically did what they wanted to (pick a president by stopping the Florida vote count on very dubious legal grounds), which was in some ways against precedent and then said “this doesn’t set any precedent outside of this one case” because they knew the reasoning was problematic. The court is perfectly capable of carving out one off “irrational” decisions and ignoring language in pursuit of a specific objective if they want to.
This is very clever and I follow the reasoning. But if congress has already found trump unqualified (as you say, with their majority votes in 2021) why would the court say Colorado was in error to remove him? Your parsing of their language might be logically correct but if this had been the courts intention, wouldn’t that have added “and congress has already so found” to the end of their opinion? I don’t understand how this could be actionable. The court will just swat it down again.
Do they contradict themselves? Then they contradict themselves. You have to look no further than bush v gore to see that the court is perfectly capable of that.
Great question, Sam! And the answer is one that will sound coy but is really not: SCOTUS established this new legal framework *via Anderson*, so it could not have been raised by anyone prior to just a few days ago. In other words, the Anderson litigants did not (and could not) have raised it in their filings, as they did not know SCOTUS would respond to those filings, as it did a few days ago, by establishing a new legal framework that can only work if Trump was already disqualified from federal office as of February 2021.
This also explains why SCOTUS did not address it: it was way, way outside anything in the *filings* in Anderson. While SCOTUS did of course go beyond the question those filings established—the "single question" the Court acknowledged was before it—we could not *also* say that the Court needed to argue over interpretation of a legal framework it was *at that moment establishing*. We do not require the Court to argue with itself; we expect litigants to do so in response to rulings and that is just what should happen here.
That doesn’t make sense though. They then finished their finding by saying Colorado was “in error”. That is exactly “applying the framework that we’re in the moment establishing”. They answered the one question - and then acted on the answer.
If they’d wanted to, they could have said something like “in the matter of who can enforce (the one matter before them) we find only congress can. Since congress has already acted via the 2021 votes, we find that Colorado’s action is valid and stands, not because they had the right to decide as a state, but because congress has decided already”. But they didn’t do that. They settled the issue at hand *and* applied it to Colorado (as you might say, incorrectly but hey, what’s a little contradiction among us supremes, amiright?)
The USSC appears not to have considered all relevant facts; to wit, they failed to grok their decision to lower threshold for disability to hold office to majority vote in Congress opened the door for the previously recorded majority votes on Trump's second impeachment proceeding in Congress for inciting an insurrection. It seems that simple.
I’d love y’all to be right about this, believe me. It just seems highly unlikely that none of the 9 justices contemplated this during the period of review. Perhaps one or two of the liberal justices did and kept their mouths shut but it amounts to the same thing - the majority will just say “nah, didn’t mean that, move on” if someone tries to call them on it. They meant to say he gets to stay on the ballot, and they said it. It would be nice to think we could hold them accountable for all of the implications of their words but we can’t. Cf the ethics mess with Thomas.
In Bush v Gore they basically did what they wanted to (pick a president by stopping the Florida vote count on very dubious legal grounds), which was in some ways against precedent and then said “this doesn’t set any precedent outside of this one case” because they knew the reasoning was problematic. The court is perfectly capable of carving out one off “irrational” decisions and ignoring language in pursuit of a specific objective if they want to.