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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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It is probably relevant to mention there is direct and relevant precedent here: Last September Couy Griffen was removed from his office as Otero County Commissioner under section 3 because of his involvement in Jan 6.

Obviously it's possible to argue that the New Mexico judge who made that ruling got it wrong, or that Trump's actions were different to Griffin's in determinative ways. But it does suggest that the legal system is going to take this section 3 argument seriously and that it can't be brushed off as a nothingburger, as some posters here are suggesting.

EDIT: I just looked it up, the NM judge in this case was a Republican appointee. No idea how conservative/partisan he is in other cases.

Cowboys For Trump founder from Otero County:

Subsequent to his 2022 conviction for the trespassing charge, a suit was filed by the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the residents of New Mexico under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that would bar him from holding a public office for life due to his participation in insurrection.[11]

Following the Disqualification Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew removed Griffin from public office on September 6, 2022, due to his participation in insurrection.[12][13] The debarment from holding public office for insurrection is "for life", he may never hold a public office again unless the debarment is overruled by a higher court or an Act of Congress. Removal of Griffin from his office marked the first instance of a democratically-elected official being disqualified from holding public office under the constitutional provision since the disqualification of the socialist, Victor Berger, in 1919 by a special committee of Congress.[14][15]

Griffin appealed the case to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal on procedural grounds in November,[16] and reaffirmed this dismissal in February 2023.[17]

The legal details on this case are hidden in the footnotes on Wikipedia, but if the case ends up being used as precedent against Trump, you can bet it’ll be a full article of feature quality, and locked for editing, shortly.

Dismissal on procedural grounds by the Supreme Court of New Mexico makes me smell something foul, but I haven't been following the case since it hasn’t been discussed on the podcasts I listen to or the news I watch.

Griffin was convicted of trespassing, was also already considered a useless putz by the broader New Mexico GOP, and appeals floundered because the man's lawyers didn't bother filing the full appeal.

I'm not sure that system was taken seriously, so much as used as an excuse to get rid of a meddlesome priest.

((Conversely, I'm incredibly skeptical that someone's going to get published arguing the same in any other political direction.))

People absolutely shouldn't be dismissing it as a nothingburger. Nothingburgers go away on their own; this is very likely going to have to be fought in court, and has a reasonable chance of changing who gets the Republican nomination. It's absolutely a consequential event.

The productive argument is over what the consequences are likely to be.

And the consequences could even be pro-Trump! If this is popularly seen as the extreme of suppressing political dissent, and fails at the supreme court, you could easily see this giving Trump a good bit of momentum.

I think the question of whether the consequences are pro- or anti-Trump are largely irrelevant.

The most significant consequence is that, sometime soon, when people really need consensus on rule of law to be there, it won't be there. I'm well past the point where any appeal to legal precedent or argument sways me, because I do not believe that the rule of law actually exists, or has for quite some time. I will, as I have before, use this incident and others like it to argue that any attempt to share society with Blues is hopeless, and that separation or war are the only alternatives remaining. I think this incident makes my argument more persuasive than it was before to the marginal Red.

The most significant consequence is that, sometime soon, when people really need consensus on rule of law to be there, it won't be there.

No. Mainstream conservatives have thoroughly demonstrated that they will accept the decisions which come out of the mechanisms of law even when those mechanisms are throughly corrupted. The skinsuiting gambit works. The dissenters are few enough to simply be jailed or shot.

Do you have examples in mind?

(to be clear, this is more to understand than to challenge)

January 6 verdicts. Alex Jones verdicts. Tiki torch felony convictions. The mainstream right just doesn't care; once the left uses the proper mechanisms of the state to declare the guilt of a rightist, the mainstream right accepts that as just and proper. "Well if you didn't want to be a felon maybe you shouldn't have taken that tiki torch to the rally".

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