Will Trump provoke a crisis of legitimacy for the US supreme court? | Sidney Blumenthal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% : Nonetheless, Trump recognized himself as an "officer", presumably under the United States.
53% : It works hand in hand with originalism to exclude inconvenient portions of the historical record from judicial consideration.
53% : The conundrum for the court is that it can rescue Trump only by shredding originalism and textualism.
51% : Textualism is the sister doctrine of originalism, providing snatches of text from the constitution divorced from social and legislative context as if in scriptural fundamentalism to undergird the reversal of rights.
46% : The court can only rescue Trump from the Colorado ruling by shredding originalism and textualism.
46% : The Colorado supreme court found, without disagreement, and by clear and convincing evidence, that Trump indeed engaged in insurrection on January 6.
46% : The court heard and accepted the detailed evidence of Trump's pattern of incitement and violence surrounding the insurrection from an expert witness on political extremism, Peter Simi, a sociologist from Chapman University who has provided training to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.
44% : "Trump himself as president has called himself an "officer".
42% : Trump has also weighed in numerous times on the question of whether constitutional disqualification is self-executing.
41% : It offered no objection to ruling that January 6 was an insurrection and that Trump is an insurrectionist.
40% : Indeed, given that Trump has not challenged the facts, he may not in fact have a true basis for an appeal.
40% : If the court grants Trump a reign of impunity as well as total immunity for his past actions, it will also be opening the gate for his stated intention to abrogate the constitution to establish a dictatorship in the future.
38% : Trump organized his coup to "stop the steal" before the election, just as the secessionists organized their actions before election day.
37% : Or the court could claim that Trump ultimately has immunity from any charges of insurrection, placing the former president above the law.
36% : But bringing up the civil war only reinforces the already airtight case against Trump.
32% : The notion that the court might relieve Trump because he is not, at least yet, convicted for the insurrection of January 6 would contradict the character of all constitutional disqualifications, which do not depend upon criminality.
32% : She dismissed his claim to free speech outright: "The evidence shows that Trump not only knew about the potential for violence, but that he actively promoted it and, on January 6, 2021, incited it.
30% : If the supreme court were to decide that Trump must be tried and convicted of insurrection in order to be disqualified, it would severely undermine the intent of the Constitution as well as all precedents.
30% : Trump then attempted to evade judgment by splitting semantic hairs, claiming that "engagement" was not "incitement", again rejected by the court as a distinction without a difference: "Having considered the arguments, the Court concludes that engagement under Section Three of the 14th Amendment includes incitement to insurrection."
30% : Thus, Trump was adjudicated to be an insurrectionist.
28% : The factor Trump hyped was a lie, but the "technicality" that disqualification is self-executing is not.
26% : The decision earlier this week by the Colorado supreme court disqualifying Trump from the state ballot strikes at more than Trump's eligibility.
26% : The decision holds that Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021, and that he is therefore barred for running for president under section three of the 14th amendment.
26% : Two leading conservative legal scholars, William Baude, of the University of Chicago law school, and Michael Stokes Paulsen, of the University of St Thomas law school, arguing on strict originalist grounds, state unequivocally that Trump is constitutionally barred from running for office.
24% : If the court denies certiorari, declining to rule on the case, or upholds the Colorado decision, Trump would face disqualification cases in states across the country, throwing the election into chaos.
20% : When he criticized the justice department for issuing sentencing guidelines to be applied to the criminal convictions of his close associates Roger Stone and Mike Flynn, Trump tweeted it was a "miscarriage of justice".
19% : The only escape hatch, for the court and for Trump, would be a momentary, politically derivative expedient, such as asserting that Trump has been denied due process because he has not been criminally prosecuted for insurrection.
19% : "The Court concludes that Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification," the Denver district court state judge Sarah Wallace ruled on 17 November.
5% : In his spurious and vile campaign claiming that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen, his birther lie, Trump stated on many occasions that if President Obama could not prove his nativity, then he should be disqualified from holding office.
5% : "Trump repeated his belief that constitutional disqualification was self-executing in 2016 against Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican primary opponent, whom Trump falsely said was not a natural-born citizen and therefore could not hold the presidency.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.