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Colorado Supreme Court Thread

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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 "holding" vs "running" argument is funny, but it really just kicks the can down the road -- Trump's probably hoping until votes are being counted for the general election, but Colorado specifically already has had recent lawsuits over Secretaries of State making orders related to election processes weeks before the election, and there's no reason it couldn't happen in the primary season, too.

Ruling specifically on Trump's eligibility as a matter of legal fact has the problem where it's both too much into political questions for a few members of the court, and simultaneously not enough to actually table the problem. The same approaches can and have migrated to other politicians, and as the emoluments clause fandom demonstrates, there's always some new fact pattern to bring.

Congress having to act would remove a lot of further legal gamesmanship, but I dunno how well it would appeal to most of the Court. At the simplest level, the approach Trump is advocating would not just allow but encourage a situation where a candidate was cleanly and clearly the winner of a state and then the House of Representatives reject that state -- and while I'd recognize some schadenfreude in a reversal, the spectre of Jan 6 isn't something that they're forgetting. Especially given the extent Baude/Paulsen and the lower courts here have rejected due process concerns or even argued that the 14th Amendment overrides earlier test in the Constitution, there's also a lot of really bad problems that could fall from Congress having the power to declare insurrectionists by law.