Newsletter: The Supreme Court should prevent electoral chaos by ruling Trump ineligible

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Jan. 13, 2024. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

Two weeks ago, I made a non-lawyerly argument for using the 14th Amendment to disqualify former President Trump from the ballot. Section 3 of that amendment prohibits anyone from holding office who has taken an oath to the Constitution but “engaged in insurrection” — and in attempting to thwart Congress’ ratification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory by inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the former president engaged in insurrection.

So, a straightforward reading of the 14th Amendment — something the constitutional textualists who make up the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority should favor — requires keeping Trump off the ballot, right?

I do not hesitate to say yes, but this is where an expert with actual experience interpreting and enforcing the law and persuading judges may see things differently. Enter op-ed columnist Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney and deputy attorney general, who strongly believes the Supreme Court will strike down attempts by individual states to remove Trump from their ballots, but that none of its possible legal rationales lacks serious flaws.

I guess, then, it comes down to whether you believe it’s worse to “permit a patchwork result,” as Litman writes, by allowing states to apply the 14th Amendment, or to lean on faulty legal reasoning to achieve a politically expedient outcome. Litman acknowledges that the court’s primary motivation here is to preserve the public’s perception of electoral legitimacy. In other words, the justices will have to issue a ruling that heavily weighs its practical implications, an approach I generally favor.

But even then, the language and purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment appear too clear to wave off with these arguments. The practical realities also beg for enforcement: The amendment’s framers in the 1860s saw the real possibility that former office holders could serve in the government they had just attempted to bring down in the Civil War, and they created this explicit remedy. Now, in 2024, we are faced with the real possibility that a former president could return to power after he tried to stop Congress from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to ratify the electoral vote — and the only question is whether we want to use the remedy given to us by the 14th Amendment’s framers.

I believe we should, and if the U.S. Supreme Court wants to uphold the law, preserve the public’s perception of its legitimacy and serve the practical purpose of electoral uniformity, it should rule unanimously that Trump is indeed disqualified from office for engaging in insurrection, per the 14th Amendment.

Trump’s attempt to intimidate a federal appeals court could ensure his defeat. I mean, is this the guy we really want to protect from the Constitution’s insurrectionist ban? Former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut says of Trump’s threatening statements after a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing that “it’s hard to imagine anything more damaging to one’s prospects in a case than attempting to intimidate the judges considering it,” and if Trump’s convicted, polls show his chances of returning to the White House will drop significantly.

Trump’s immunity arguments are laughable, unpersuasive — and dangerous to democracy. In addition to staying on the ballot, the former president is trying to stay out of jail. To do that, he’s trying to persuade judges that he’s immune from prosecution for any official acts taken while president. The Times’ editorial board doesn’t like this argument: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit must reject Trump’s claim, not only to ensure that he faces a jury but also to deter future presidents from acting criminally.”

Worried about Trump returning to the White House? Here’s how to protect immigrants in your family. Columnist Jean Guerrero expresses alarm over the former president’s rhetoric suggesting he wants to “purge the nation of races he says are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” She spoke with activists to put together a list of actions not only meant to prevent Trump’s reelection, but also to protect immigrants should he return to office.

Greening his Northern California home saved him money, but it was difficult. Evan Mills, a retired senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, set out to reduce energy consumption at his five-bedroom home. And if anyone could do this, you’d think it’d be him — but among other challenges, what he found was “insufficient, inscrutable or inaccurate information from product manufacturers, sales reps and energy providers, particularly about how much energy we could save.”

Pushing STEM majors is turning out to be a terrible investment. Just about the only thing on which Democrats and Republicans agree is the need to train more people in so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). But sociologist John D. Skrentny says there’s a problem with this: Jobs in those fields are difficult, the wages fail to keep up over time, and STEM graduates often burn out and leave those careers for greener pastures.

More from this week in opinion

From our columnists

• Robin Abcarian: With every release of court documents, the damage Jeffrey Epstein did to his victims confronts us anew
• LZ Granderson: Working through COVID, flu and RSV has become the terrible new normal
• Jonah Goldberg: Will Mike Johnson get away with betraying MAGA House members with his proposed budget?

From the Op-Ed desk

• California just banned “crime-free” housing. Here’s why other states should too
• This Supreme Court case from California could ease housing shortages everywhere
• I am half Israeli and half Palestinian. This war feels as if it’s killing me twice

From the editorial board

• Imelda Padilla for Los Angeles City Council District 6
• Reelect Janice Hahn to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors
• Big decisions for L.A. and California voters on the March 5 primary ballot

Letters to the editor

• If you think Trump deserves to be on the ballot, read the Colorado court opinion
• The Supreme Court can do the GOP a huge favor by disqualifying Trump
• Claudine Gay’s “inadequate citation” sure looks like plagiarism