To claim that the sitting President of the US sought to engineer an insurrection against the very government that he was heading is absurd, but that is what the Supreme Court of Colorado is claiming in its majority verdict against Trump, writes Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat
Should Joe Biden fail in his bid to win a second term in the White House, Attorney General of the United States Merrick Garland may be known in history books less for his enviable judicial record than for the manner in which Donald J. Trump is being persecuted by the Justice Department.
The reasons may not be either personal (Judge Garland was blocked from becoming a Supreme Court Justice by Trump supporters in the US Senate) or political (such as by seeking to ensure that President Biden’s most formidable opponent not be allowed to contest against him). However, the surprising verdict of the Colorado Supreme Court that Trump not be allowed to stand in the state’s Republican primary polls a few weeks later adds credibility (deservedly or not) to the charge of election tampering.
It increases the perception that some influentials who prefer Biden to Trump in the White House may be resorting to actions that on the face of it constitute election interference, and that too without being either Russian or agents of Vladimir Putin. To claim that the sitting President of the US sought to engineer an insurrection against the very government that he was heading is absurd, but that is what the Supreme Court of Colorado is claiming in its majority verdict against Trump.
Insurrection? Did Trump when President try to get the military to take control of government offices to block Biden from being sworn in on 20 January 2021? Did the US President send a secret order to government officials to refuse to take orders from the new incumbent of the White House after Biden was sworn in?
The standard of proof required to rationally find a sitting President of the US guilty of launching an insurrection against the state has to be on a very different level from that applicable in the case of citizens without access to that awesome authority. Trump being Trump, it is very possible that he genuinely believed that he had won the 2020 Presidential polls.
Trump being Trump, he fulminated endlessly about this and on January 6, 2021 gathered a crowd around him that turned riotous. What a collection of frenzied individuals did on 6 January 2021 at the Capitol was criminal.
To call it another Civil War is to reveal a flair for uncontrolled exaggeration that does little credit to the Justice Department. When last enquired into, Joe Biden was President of the United States and not the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Yet, in the absence of any definitive verdict of guilty by a court against Trump on the charge of seeking to launch an insurrection, Biden pronounced Trump guilty of just such a crime, that too in public.
Clearly, Biden is in sync with the Justice Department, which is with great zeal prosecuting Trump on this and numerous other charges in what gives every sign of being an organised with hunt. Every judge on the Colorado Supreme Court has been appointed by Democrats and not by Republicans, but it would be wrong to ascribe political motives to jurists.
In their verdict, the judges have pre-emptively found the former US President guilty of sedition, or in other words guilty of seeking to subvert the nation in the manner attempted by Confederates during the Civil War.
The constitutional provision that they used to come to such a finding was explicitly added to the US Constitution after the Civil War to block any future attempt at partitioning the country. Such use of a provision to deny a citizen the right to be on the ballot even in a party primary ( for that would be the import of the judgment) is unprecedented where a President is concerned.
Given the absurdity of the charge, even Supreme Court justices appointed by Democratic and not Republican Presidents need to concur that the verdict of the Colorado Supreme Court against Trump is perverse and bad in law. Poor President Biden. With every turn of the screw by Attorney General Merrick Garland and his staff against Trump, and there have been several, the popularity of the President dips further while that of Trump rises.
Despite the absence of any respite from the blizzard of court cases that have been filed against him, the odds are rising that Trump will be the Republican nominee for the 2024 Presidential polls, with California Governor Gavin Newsom as his likely opponent, given the collapse in the number of voters who favour Biden.
Were he to be chosen yet again as his party’s standard bearer, Trump would be well advised to show magnanimity and sensitivity by choosing Nikki Haley as his Vice-Presidential pick. If he is eliminated by a judicial route, Haley would be an excellent replacement.
Another candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, is a bit ahead of the times, and may need to wait a term or two before his sort of thinking catches on with enough voters to make him a serious contender. Leaving aside her marching in lockstep with Secretary of State Blinken in equating the war in Ukraine as being as consequential as World War II was, Haley has shown herself to be a worthy contender for being the first woman to someday get elected as the President of the US.
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