Trump and the Courts (Long Post)

The left has their unisex panties in a bunch because SCOTUS voted 9-0 that a state doesn’t have the power to remove a candidate from the ballot. The decision was based upon the 14th Amendment, Section 3 of which the left claims granted states the authority to bar a person (in this case, Trump) from running for office if they were involved in an insurrection.

Section 3: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

However, SCOTUS denied this claim, saying that Section 5 of the same Amendment vests that power solely in the Congress.

Section 5: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

I am not going to go into too many specifics of this case, because I don’t really want to get into this case. Instead, I want to talk about the next Trump case, explain how SCOTUS is going to rule in Trump’s favor, then explain why it won’t matter. The above points matter in the upcoming case, and I will explain why.

The case involves the actions taken by Trump while he was contesting the results of the 2020 election. He is facing criminal prosecution for those actions which have resulted in 91 criminal charges spread among four cases. Trump is arguing that he has immunity for these actions because they were taken in furtherance of his official duties. I believe that he is correct for the following reasons:

Civil Immunity

After Nixon left the White House, he was sued for actions that he had taken while he was President. Nixon argued that a president cannot be sued for official actions taken while he is in office. The case is Nixon v. Fitzgerald, and it clearly establishes that Presidents have immunity from civil liability for acts taken while executing their official duties, even if they are sued for those acts after leaving office.

Criminal Immunity

The left counters that this doesn’t apply to criminal immunity. I think that they are wrong, because of the Federalist papers, debates at the Constitutional Convention, and the early history of constitutional interpretation demonstrate an assumption of absolute Presidential immunity. One of our founding fathers (Gouverneur Morris1– the youngest signed of the Articles of Confederation- see below)argued that the President can do no criminal act without accomplices who may be punished. In the event that the President were to be re-elected, that will be sufficient proof of his innocence. I assume that the unlawful act Morris referred to was taken as an official duty. I also assume that pulling out a handgun and shooting the first lady, accepting bribes, and the like would not be covered by immunity because they were likely not official acts. Note that actions taken while executing official duties need not be lawful, as long as they are official acts. The remedy here for the punishment of unlawful, official acts is impeachment and elections. To do otherwise would mean that Presidents would need to clear every decision and act through White House legal counsel, making the President a slave to his attorneys.

To me, this is important because it’s the reason why Obama can’t be prosecuted for assassinations of American citizens that were carried out on his orders. The fact remains that Obama, through his orders, committed murder of an American citizen, but since he did so in furtherance of his official duties, the only remedy available to the US is impeachment or subsequent elections. It has to be this way, or Truman could very well have been executed for the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima as a war criminal.

The reason for this, is that the Executive is the only branch of government that consists of a single person. Congress has two houses, Constitutionally made up of at least 50 Senators and 50 Representatives, and the Supreme court, made up of multiple Justices. The Executive is the only branch with one member, meaning that it is the only one who needs criminal immunity for actions taken in official duties.

Official Duties

So the question remains, were the acts that Trump took to dispute the veracity and accuracy of the election official acts? I would say yes, they are. There are numerous laws about elections and how they are to be carried out. Enforcing those laws is the responsibility of the Executive and well within the purview of the Chief Executive.

Now this doesn’t mean that Trump is above the law. He was impeached for those actions less than a week after the end of his term, but the Senate failed to convict. Trump was indicted on August 1, 2023, for the conduct for which he was impeached, which is what this entire case is built upon. It’s important to note that his opponent in the election, who happens to be the current President, waited three years to file the indictment, an obvious attempt at election tampering.

The question for SCOTUS is this: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” For the above reasons, I believe that SCOTUS has no choice but to vote in support of Presidential Immunity, or else it endangers the entire concept of the peaceful transition of power, meaning that Trump’s current criminal cases will disappear, at least at the Federal level.

So What Then?

With all of this being said, the left simply won’t allow Trump to return to the Oval Office. The Federal Bureaucrats simply can’t allow it, or he will begin swinging the metaphorical budget slashing machete. Should Trump regain the Presidency, a lot of Federal careers will come to an end- perhaps even entire departments.

The left simply HATES Trump, and will see him dead before he is permitted back into the White House. They can’t let Trump ruin their communist takeover.

For those reasons, expect violence when lawfare doesn’t work. Perhaps Trump will even be assassinated. I don’t think that they are desperate enough to take him out like Sadat was killed, but I don’t see Trump ever again being President.


1Gouverneur Morris was an important figure in the First Continental Congress. He cast the deciding vote against Court Martial for George Washington, which would have removed him from command of the Army, which would mean that he would not have been our First President. The other thing is that he argued that the poor would sell their votes to the rich and that voting should be restricted to property owners.

Inventing Phrases in COTUS

So to catch you up, a lefty made the assertion that:

I still haven’t seen any proof of the 2020 election being stolen. All I’ve seen is unproven, anecdotal talking points.

Someone else came in and said:

I support Desantis too, but let’s not overdo it. The laws that were illegally changed, drop boxes, illegal ballot harvesting, ballot dumps. Yes, it has all happened and documented.

The original lefty then said:

The drop boxes were legal. The laws were changed based on emergency protocols dictated by the Trump administration. Yet nobody (including Trump’s attorneys) have been able to prove to me that there was real mass voter fraud, & every one of them have come out & said there wasn’t & admitted they LIED.

That’s where I felt the need to jump in:

Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” The legislature- no one else. Any other means is not legal. There is nothing there about “emergencies”

The moron lefty then says that the use of the word ‘may’ in the phrase “as the Legislature may direct” means that other agencies of the government can change the rules for selecting electors as they see fit.

Where do they come up with this stuff? Of course he is wrong. Let me refer you to legal scholars from Dartmouth in 2009:

The Election Clauses found in Articles I and II of the United States Constitution limit the authority of state administrative agents to develop rules for federal elections — both congressional and presidential. These two Clauses prohibit non-legislative agents from adding to, changing, or contradicting legislatively enacted rules. The Clauses leave some room for non-legislative agents, but only if a State Legislature has clearly delegated regulatory power to them.

(Brown, 2008)

Or you can try this one:

Article II’s Presidential Electors Clause, however, confer authority to regulate federal elections specifically upon State “legislatures,” rather than granting it to States as a whole. An intratextual analysis of the Constitution reveals that the term “legislature” is best understood as referring solely to the entity within each state comprised of representatives that has the general authority to pass laws. 

(Morley, 2015)

Then there are also SCOTUS cases, including McPherson v. Blacker, where the court ruled that a state’s legislature may delegate its authority to select Presidential electors, but must do so through a legislative act. Before that case, most state legislatures selected their Presidential electors directly.

In short, there are administrative agencies that can select electors, but the procedure must be done in accordance with the instructions and limitations put in place by that state’s legislature. There are no states that I am aware of that permitted the use of unstaffed drop boxes, or those maintained by third parties. The fact that election committees carried out policies and procedures without following the direction of the legislatures means that any votes cast by those rules are unconstitutional.

Of course, we will never know because not one case arising from the 2020 election was decided on evidence or merit, because every one of them was dismissed on procedural grounds.

I can guarantee you that the next election will face similar shenanigans. It’s as if there is a nationwide conspiracy that is taking its direction from a central committee. There is no reason at this point to believe that the events and shenanigans from the last election will be any different.

So to those of you on the right who are busy arguing over whether Trump or DeSantis would be the better candidate- do you really think that it will matter, knowing that the left will ensure a win for their candidate no matter what?


References:

  • Brown, Mark R., Structural Limitations on the Non-Legislative Regulations of Federal Elections (August 1, 2008). 7 Dartmouth L. J. 260 (2009), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2264987
  • McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1 (1892)
  • Michael T. Morley, The Intratextual Independent “Legislature” and the Elections Clause, 109 Nw. U. L. Rev. 847 (2015). https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/nulr/vol109/iss3/10

Hacking Voting Machines

This comes in on the heels of reports of election shenanigans in DC. In a courtroom drama scene that seems right out of a dystopian television show, a computer science professor from the University of Michigan demonstrated how to hack a dominion voting machine in a Georgia courtroom on Friday.

Using a machine set up for a Presidential election between George Washington and Benedict Arnold, the professor borrowed a pen from the defense attorney and used it to hack a voting machine in real time, changing vote counts, and causing it to execute routines that changed votes.

The professor has come under fire after he wrote a report outlining dozens of vulnerabilities in the software on Dominion voting machines. One of the ones he found was an arbitrary-code-execution vulnerability that can be exploited to spread malware from a county’s central election management system (EMS) to every voting machine in its jurisdiction. This makes it possible to cause changes in large numbers of voting machines without needing physical access to any of them. This would allow an attacker to defeat the technical and procedural protections the state of Georgia has in place.

At this point, the ONLY way to ensure the security and integrity of elections is to have paper balloting, which allows effective auditing and accountability. Electronic devices are simply not secure enough to ensure that elections are on the up and up.

In Case You Were Wondering

If the election in 2024 was going to be rigged, remember that in the 2020 election, 353 counties in 29 states had more registered voters than they did residents. Now we know that in 2023, registered voters in Washington, DC are 131% of the population. There is no reason to think that this phenomenon is restricted to DC.

So now ask yourself if it matters whether you vote for Trump or DeSantis.

Voting is no longer a viable option for avoiding the train wreck that is coming.

Mooting

Taking a page from New York’s antigun Democrats in attempting to thwart SCOTUS, Colorado’s SecState has announced that she will put Trump back on the ballot despite that state’s Supreme Court ruling that he is ineligible. They aren’t doing this because they are trying to be kind. They are doing this because they are hoping that SCOTUS will declare that the issue is moot, then fail to take up the case. If they can push it out until the court recesses in May, it’s a done deal that won’t be addressed before the court reconvenes in October.

At the same time, Maine has announced that they also will be removing Trump from the ballot. So far, that is 14 electoral votes already in Biden’s pocket, with another 256 in play. As I pointed out before, this is the game plan: to win the election without having to cheat as much this time.

First Domino?

Now that the Colorado Supreme Court has disqualified Trump from holding any public office, will this be the first domino? Are we seeing the first steps towards the 2024 cheat? Is this the next step in an American dictatorship?

Here is the tracker. This is important. Colorado is out of play for Trump, meaning that even if he DOES get the Republican nomination, he has just lost 10 electoral votes. Now Biden doesn’t have to cheat or even run for office in that state. He is the default winner. Watch this closely. If only ten states disqualify Trump, there is no point in even having the election. It’s a done deal.

The Republicans have no balls. If they did, Colorado delegates would not be seated at the convention.

It’s a good thing that the Democrats saved our Democracy, eh?

Let’s See Them Enforce It

The Supreme Court in June of this year ruled that the President doesn’t have the authority to forgive student loans, only Congress, with COTUS stating that all spending bills originate in the house, does.

Yesterday, another 813,000 people got letters in the mail, telling them that their student loans have been forgiven. To date, 3.6 million borrowers will have had $127 billion in student loan debt wiped out since Biden took office. The government isn’t even ensuring that the people borrowing the money are being truthful on their applications.

This President is simply ignoring the Supreme Court while his supporters are calling those supporting his opponents “fascists.” So what is fascism? The communists on the left have redefined it to mean a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen.

However, the guy who invented fascism, Benito Mussolini, had this to say:

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”

Consider some of the components of fascist economics: central planning, heavy state subsidies, protectionism (high tariffs), steep levels of nationalization, rampant cronyism, large deficits, high government spending, bank and industry bailouts, overlapping bureaucracy, massive social welfare programs, crushing national debt, bouts of inflation and “a highly regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic structure.”

Tell me if this doesn’t describe the Democrat platform…

But instead, the left claims that they are a liberal democracy that supports individual rights, competitive elections, and political dissent, even while they cheat at elections, suppress dissent by deplatforming anyone who disagrees with them, and tosses their political opponents in prison.

The left claims that Trump and his supporters are fascists because they advocate for the overthrow of the existing system of government and the persecution of political enemies, even as they openly advocate for the same.

But now we have an Executive that simply ignores rulings of the Supreme Court when he finds it convenient to do so, and he is doing it because a Harvard Professor told him to back in June:

The central tenet of the solution that we recommend—Popular Constitutionalism—is that courts do not exercise exclusive authority over constitutional meaning. In practice, a President who disagrees with a court’s interpretation of the Constitution should offer and then follow an alternative interpretation. If voters disagree with the President’s interpretation, they can express their views at the ballot box. 

How can they express their feelings at the ballot box, when the ballot box is no longer a representation of the will of the people?


Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945, Madison: Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, p. 7.