Colorado doesn't have a chance with the Supreme Court. It's been co-opted, too.
How do I know this? Look at the stupid, awful, ridiculous attempt to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejando Mayorkas. It reveals the shameful attitudes of far too many Republicans and how today's politics have been reduced to mutual face-slapping.
Mayorkas came within a hair's breadth of being impeached for absolutely nothing. The Republicans have tried to smear him for incompetence and neglect, when all he's trying to do is execute policy as best he can--as best as the Republicans have helped, or mostly not helped at all, to shape it. In the sad majority, the House Republicans have conjured accusations that Mayorkas, gasp, has lied to them.
Oh? Nobody defending ex- in the vast investigations of his horrible acts five years ago lied? They lied like rugs, in front of everyone, and we all knew it. They put a gossamer thin coating over what couldn't be hidden. Or they refused to testify, defying subpoenas, and dared anyone to make them.
All Mayorkas has done is to put his head down and deal with an impossible situation, specifically designed to make the Biden Administration look inadequate--when in fact it has been, if anything, more efficient about trying to keep migrants on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border, reducing an absurd number of them from seeking asylum, and removing the ones they can.
In other words, it has responded to Republicans who desperately need to create 2024 campaign issues out of thin air. The latest attempt to provide them with exactly what they wanted--increased enforcement and the money to pay for it, in exchange for funding for the wars in Israel (which Republicans lather over) and Ukraine and military support for Taiwan, all badly needed--has been thrown back at it by jackbooted followers of ex- at his order. It is a frightening prospect, but one that must be called out by Biden and his supporters, now, at every turn.
Mayorkas is caught up in this only because he is the convenient scapegoat, because Biden cannot be touched with impeachment nonsense, or perhaps he now will be with smears galore about his feebleness burnishing. Even so, a handful of Republicans with consciences left--looking at you, Mike Gallagher, of the 8th District of Wisconsin, in the Green Bay area (who, if you recall, was one of the first Congresspeople to go public with a plea to stop the attempted insurrection: his announcement that he won't run for another term coming immediately after the Mayorkas vote--coincidence? I think not)--prevented an impeachment vote from passing the other day. It embarrassed Speaker Mike Johnson, who deserves to be embarrassed many times over.
Nevertheless, the hubbub and energy expended about useless details, and the utter vindictiveness of it all, has created a mindset in the Supreme Court that, while probably supportable, indicates that rationality has pretty much left the basis of our politics.
The justices can hardly be blamed. They understand full well that, if Colorado should be allowed to successfully accuse ex- of an insurrection, without enforceable definition, other state legislatures will seize upon any reasonably noticeable public disorder and blame it on Biden, accusing him of motivating the forces behind it (as if he would), and take him out off the ballot for president in their states, charging him with "insurrection."
The Supreme Court could, if it wanted to, define the term "insurrection" to sufficiently narrow ex-'s participation on 1/6/21 to encompass it. But then the justices who voted in favor of it would be accused of establishing an ex post facto definition, strictly prohibited by the Constitution. Colorado, and Maine (which has also tried to stop ex- from being on ballots in 2024) wouldn't mind that at all; I think Colorado was half-expecting that.
With three justices appointed by ex-, and two more clearly in his camp, though, I highly doubt that they will take a detached view and do what's most appropriate. Such definition would stop a tit-for-tat, vengeance-filled succession of state legislatures from slicing ex- and Biden from their ballots due to conjured accusations of attempt at "insurrection," keep all of our eyes on the ball, and utilize Article 3 of the 14th Amendment to project enforcement of it the way it's supposed to be done, the way the simple wording of it suggests.
Of course, if it did so, it might also encourage splinter groups to "fake" attempts to take over state governments by trying to disguise assaults on state capitols and spread false press releases saying that, for instance, a rowdy group of Democrats tried to overthrow the state government of, say, Idaho, when they did no such thing, kind of like the way the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as "Indians" in Boston Harbor in 1773. So there's that, too. Dirty trick? Wasn't 1/6/21 a dirty trick, too?
So the Supreme Court is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. The rule of law is clearly endangered to the point at which the "right" thing can't be supported anymore because it won't be followed. Whatever its ruling, it isn't likely to be respected because the Court ruled it to be so; it's likely to be respected only because justice has given way to power, as blind and coercive as it may be. The Supreme Court has admitted, in other words, that it is helpless.
The failed impeachment of Alejando Mayorkas proved that, with a whisper of rationality saving the Congress from being tied up uselessly for months. Note, though, that that rationality is quite narrow, very edgy, and subject to reversal instantaneously. The Republicans in Congress are acting the way the late Marquette men's basketball coach Al McGuire said: Like a bouncer starting a fight in the bar to justify his existence. They can't justify passing the best possible version of a border bill designed to give them nearly everything they want because of self-imposed psychological dependence on a complete fool, so they busy themselves creating a quasi-legal excuse to harass a Biden Cabinet member, inventing their own dog whistle because they know they don't have a remotely justifiable excuse to impeach Biden.
The Supreme Court doesn't have a remotely justifiable excuse to stick ex- with the obvious label of "insurrectionist," or at least it doesn't think it can, because it's scared to death about state-invoked legislative anarchy. In other words, it can't justify its existence anymore because the guardrails about decent behavior have disappeared, and it relies on that when it makes its rulings.
When law lacks respect, force intervenes. We're not at that moment yet, but we're close.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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