delia armstrong busb

1. I predict Trump‘s Feb 12 filing asking SCOTUS to block the trial in Judge Chutkan’s court will fail, thus clearing away the immunity obstacle to Jack Smith’s prosecution for Trump‘s attempt to block the constitutional transfer of presidential power in January 2021 for the first time in our history.   2. If that prosecution results in a conviction before the 2024 election, then the nature of the charges made in the 4-count indictment, not how they were labeled, will determine whether Trump is constitutionally disqualified from holding the presidency – not by 18 USC 2383 but by the 14th Amendment itself.   3. 2383, as the lawyer for the Colorado voters reminded the justices on Feb 8, was enacted in 1862 by the 37th Congress, 4 years before the 14th Amendment, including Sec 3, was even proposed (in 1866) by the 39th Congress and 6 years before it became part of the Constitution (in 1868).   4. The fact that the disqualification penalty provision of 2383 overlaps with the disqualification imposed by Sec 3 is an irrelevant distraction:    A. the former was enacted into law long before the latter, and anyway   B. the overlap is incomplete.    (i)                     2383 applies to ALL insurrectionists, even those who held no previous office and took no oath to support the Constitution.  (ii)                  2383 demands a criminal trial with all its protections, including proof beyond reasonable doubt (iii)               2383 identifies the conduct the 37th Congress was targeting for punishment while Section 3 focuses on the conduct the 39th Congress viewed as marking the wrongdoer as too dangerous to entrust with power ever again (iv)                2383’s disqualification can be lifted only by a presidential pardon; that of Sec 3 can be lifted only by a 2/3 vote of both Houses   5. The key to figuring out what a conviction in Smith’s 4-count indictment would mean isn’t to be found in the labels of the crimes of which the defendant is convicted but in the substance of those crimes: And that’s what the DC Circuit’s ruling on Feb 6 made it easy to do: It went out of its way to explain that Trump is being federally prosecuted not just for what he did on January 6 by inciting the violent sacking of the Capitol, but for an entire course of conduct “interfering with the sequence set forth in the Constitution for the transfer of power from one president to the next” in “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government” and “thereby undermining constitutionally established procedures and the will of the Congress”, as well as violating the rights of “individual citizens to vote and have their votes count.”   6. That, of course, is what I (along with nearly every historian who has studied Section 3) says the 14th Amendment originally meant and still means today when it refers to an “insurrection” against the United States Constitution — the very conduct that Section 3 makes disqualifying, not as a penalty but as a preventive measure, a permanent safeguard for our future.   7. It will be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether that is the Constitution’s meaning. I hope it won’t shrink from the task.

Tik tok. . . . Her minutes as presiding judge in this criminal case are numbered