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zataomm  11mo ago (text post)   5801 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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The Guardian reports:

Supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 presidential election, a prominent Democrat said Sunday, warning that the leading Republican candidate is seeking to become a “political martyr” as he pursues a second presidency. Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin was speaking ahead of the nation’s highest court stepping in to adjudicate recent state rulings in Maine and Colorado that struck the former president from the general election primaries under the US constitution’s 14th amendment insurrection clause....

“Anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say if your wife was involved in the big lie in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election, had been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn’t be participating,” Raskin told CNN’s State of the Union.

“He absolutely should recuse himself. The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?”

ProPublica thinks they are running an effective pressure campaign on Clarence Thomas because they have succeeded in moving the NYT and WaPo editors from "convinced that he should resign" to "really, really convinced that he should resign," but they haven't actually changed the mind of anyone who wasn't already convinced.

The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?

I mean, he already knows that the numbers are not there in House or Senate to use impeachment, and the numbers are not there in the House to pack the court (reasonable assumption being that 100% of Republicans would oppose this, even if they could get all the Democrats behind abolishing the filibuster for legislation), and yet I notice that he didn't actually answer his own question with a "we can't do anything".

NB: Besides the "I am a lunatic" and the "he is a lunatic" options, there is also the "he is trying to sound like a lunatic for free publicity and/or safety vs. primary" option.

I think the "free publicity" point is no small part of things, but I think there's a lot of options that are still open, and Raskin's not stating those options outright less because they don't exist, and more because there are bigger benefits from the ambiguity and from crowdsourcing innovation.

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