Just a quick note on this penultimate day of 2023 to remind members of the Trump cult that Couy Griffin, founder of Cowboys for Trump, was banned from holding public office in New Mexico last year because of his involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection against Congress. In September 2022, a state judge removed Griffin as a county commissioner after ruling that the Constitution barred anyone who engaged in an insurrection from holding office. The judge cited the same section of the Constitution being used to bar Trump from running for office again. Two states, Colorado and Maine, have already decided that the Constitution prohibits Trump from being on the ballots in those states. Elections officials and courts in other states have refrained from banning Trump.
Gerard Magliocca, a constitutional scholar at Indiana University, told ABC News: “If Griffin is disqualified, then it’s a little hard to see why Trump wouldn’t be disqualified.”
A difference between Griffin, who was an Otero County Commissioner, and Trump, the former president: A federal judge found Griffin guilty of a misdemeanor charge connected to the Capitol attack; he was convicted of a trespassing charge related to the effort to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. Evidence presented at Griffin’s trial revealed that Cowboys for Trump helped mobilize the “stop the steal” protest that led to the Jan. 6 attack. Videos showed Griffin using a bullhorn and firing up Trump supporters against former Vice President Mike Pence.
Griffin was later sentenced to 14 days in jail, a $3,000 fine, 60 hours of community service and a year of supervised release.
On the other hand, members of the Trump cult say: There’s no conviction; Trump hasn’t been found guilty of anything yet. So Section 3 of the 14th Amendment can’t be invoked to keep him off ballots.
But Section 3 says nothing about a conviction being necessary, and there’s ample evidence that Trump encouraged the attack on Congress and the general insurrection of Jan. 6, the first attempt in the nation’s history to violently stop the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next.
Here’s the section:
Discover more from Dan Rodricks
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Dan Rodricks 
If one were a strict constructionist, one would have to look at the intent of the people who wrote the amendment. I am not an expert here, but I would suppose that after going through the Civil War, which was incredibly bloody and where there were folks who wanted to overthrow the federal government, the writers of the amendment wanted to prevent politicians like Jefferson Davis from becoming elected officials of the very government they attempted to subvert.
If the authors wanted only to have this apply to people who participated in the Civil War they could have said that. But they obviously wanted this to apply forever, enshrining it as an amendment to the Constitution.
The amendment says to me that if you have taken an oath to support the Constitution (which Trump did…..and, by the way, so do all lawyers sworn in to practice law in Maryland) and you have engaged in insurrection or rebellion (whether or not the insurrection was ultimately successful) against the processes of the Constitution (like the election of 2020), then the Amendment applies.
The comment by Gov. DeSantis that this effort is non-democratic is ridiculous. The states control who is on the ballot, the date of the election, whether there is voting by mail, early voting, the hours of operation at the polls, and deadlines to register to vote and deadlines to register as a candidate. The only federal regulation of presidential elections is the amendment to require all states to permit persons 18 years old or over to vote. Maine and Colorado have exercised their state control over elections.
Therefore, there are multiple possible outcomes at the S. Ct. First, the court could say that whether a particular person is permitted to run and be on the ballot is an issue to be decided by the states (kind of like abortion?) and decline to overturn these two states. They could agree with the interpretation of the amendment on the merits and state that Trump is not eligible to run. They could agree with the interpretation of the amendment, but say that there is insufficient evidence in the cases that support Trump’s involvement in the 1/6/21 events. And, I suppose there are other possibilities.
It will be interesting to see if the Trump appointees on the SCOTUS, who owe their lifetime positions to Trump, will recuse themselves from hearing the case. I sort of doubt that this is likely.
LikeLike
I just hope that awful man gets removed from the ballots of all states. He is a disgrace to our nation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Happy New Year and thank you for everything you do! We very much enjoyed your play last month! Russel and Melody Karbley
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you very much.
LikeLike