Wednesday Open Thread: The Our Democracy Is Safest When There's Only One Candidate On The Ballot Edition

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With one simple “bar” at the start of his track “Back End”, Finesse2Tymes entered pop culture immortality:

It’s cool when they do it

It’s a problem when I do it

Fuck ‘em!

Now, as the man said, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I don’t think that Hilary Clinton’s milquetoast questioning of the 2016 election’s legitimacy, or her suggestions that Joe Biden not concede the 2020 election “under any circumstances”, qualify as “incitement to insurrection” or anything close to it. But I’m also highly skeptical that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist, or a facilitator of insurrections. The irony is that had Trump screwed his courage to the proverbial sticking-place and called for every armed American to descend on D.C., things could have gone very differently indeed. Instead, he did the most Trumpian, and in this case most counter-productive thing: he ran his mouth to the crowd but took no action, like a Julius Caesar sending endless vague dispatches about Senatorial procedures from the permitted side of the Rubicon in the misguided hope that someone would handle his dirty work for him.

By doing so, Trump provided a flimsy but durable foundation for a concept that was hitherto either unknown or actively lampooned in America, namely: that some people are too dangerous to be permitted onto a ballot at all. Which is the fuzzy reasoning behind the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to bar Trump from running for President in that state. The court found that his behavior satisfied the conditions of “insurrection”, said conditions being impossibly vague from the start and also subject to change when necessary, then cited the 14th Amendment as just cause to bar him from the ballot.

Having made that ruling, the court then “paused” the verdict so the US Supremes could have a say. Which perhaps isn’t quite as non-aggressive as it seems; in doing so, the Colorado court is setting up the conditions for many other states to do something similar the minute the federal court fails to adequately slap their hands.

At the very least, this decision is historically ignorant. The 14th Amendment is a single-purpose weapon meant to be wielded against the former Confederacy, nothing more. It wasn’t applied to the men of the Bonus Army, nor did anyone ever cite the 14th in an attempt to make the case that Jesse Jackson or any other civil rights leader had rendered themselves ineligible for public office by marching against the United States. It’s a stretch equal to calling pornography and corporate political donations “free speech”, if not worse. It barely pulled 4-3 in an all-Democrat court. All the Ivy League grads voted to disqualify. All the Denver Law grads voted not to disqualify. Take from that what you like.

The Washington Post is working overtime right now to justify the Colorado court’s actions, citing the “precedent” of another Jan 6th participant being kicked off… a county board in flyover country. In a remarkable bit of “whataboutism”, the paper has also described Trump’s support of the Obama “birther” movement as being precisely equal to a Supreme Court kicking Trump off the presidential primary ballot. At the risk of ruffling some feathers out there, I’d suggest that the Post has rarely been on the moral side of anything in the past thirty or so years, swinging wildly between ultra-partisan editorializing and the coddling of staff plagiarists. Few media outlets in history have spoken power to truth quite as often as the Washington Post in recent years. They are the literal equivalent of a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, constantly misusing the language of Seventies protest and revolution in the unflinching service of the status quo now and forever, amen.

Why did the Colorado court do this, anyway? Is it simply the most extreme case yet see of the fabled Trump Derangement Syndrome — or is it the first step towards a future where potential candidates for office will need to pass muster with all available judges before they can run?

It seems impossible to believe now that the United States had pretty much zero drama surrounding about 120 years’ worth of Presidential elections, from the “Rutherfraud” selection of 1876 to the chad-countin’ stupidity of Bush v. Gore in 2000. Those days are clearly gone now. My left-wing friends believe that Republicans are systematically preventing people of color from voting via methods ranging from voter-ID laws to reducing the availability of polling stations in urban centers; my right-wing friends are no less certain that certain voting offices can and will “find” as many (D) votes as necessary to carry the handful of swing states that really determine the election. Oh, and then we have the idea of mail-in balloting, which isn’t secure enough to determine if an Amazon warehouse should go union but which may not be questioned under any circumstances if it’s a vote for the (right) President.

All of this is to say that confidence in “democracy”, whatever that means, is at something close to an all-time low. Using judicial fiat to remove a candidate from the ballot does nothing to improve this parlous state of affairs. Even the most ardent Biden/Harris/Newsom supporter should be terrified by the Colorado court’s action, because it could swing just as easily against them in the future. Furthermore, it inherently delegitimizes any Biden win that might occur.

If the polls can be believed, however, that Biden win looks increasingly unlikely. You don’t need to be a galaxy brain to notice that we had a lot less inflation, and a lot fewer full-scale global military conflicts, when Mr. Mean Tweets was at the helm. Whether or not Mr. Trump can claim legitimate credit for any of that is besides the point. The vast majority of Americans aren’t doing as well as they were a few years ago, and the Presidential election is often a barometer of that sentiment as much as, or more than, it is a considered verdict on the superiority of one platform over another.

If the “conspiracy” types out there are correct and Colorado is likely to swing red this election, then the actions of the Supreme Court amount to literal disenfranchisement. Or you’ll have some kind of wacky situation where Trump runs a proxy there — I vote for my former Colorado traffic attorney, noted zaftig hottie Jenna Ellis — and the electors choose to interpret a vote for Ellis as a vote for Trump. This is banana republic stuff no matter how you slice it.

Looking back, the 2000 election did an unimaginable amount of damage to our voting process, because it re-crystalized it in everyone’s mind as a game that could be won. If you had the right lawyers, the right lobbyists. If you’d been smart enough to push for a certain court appointment 12 years prior. If you had juice or leverage against the right people. As a consequence, the first thought the losing side in any election has nowadays is “Can we win this after the fact, via the courts?”

In the twenty-three years since BvG, elections have been under attack from all sides. Gerrymandering, tricks of electioneering, balloting by disreputable means. Calling for a national popular vote in the sure knowledge that California will immediately extend the franchise to non-citizens and render the rest of the country effectively irrelevant. None of this is helpful. None of it restores faith in democracy, such as it is.

The correct way to address any and all of this is to double down on measures that increase faith in elections. Mail-in ballots are inexcusable IMO — but so is running polling stations from eight to five. Since we’ve all given up on the idea of getting the results back on Election Night, why not make it three days, or a whole week, with the stations running 24/7? And why can’t you vote at Wal-Mart, anyway? Some sort of state ID should be necessary to vote. It’s the bare minimum to participate in society at any level above “homeless”. Or do it via fingerprint, retina scan, whatever else satisfies the requirement for uniquity. You get one vote per pair of eyes, or right index finger. If you don’t have eyes or a right index finger, go get a state ID. How do you enforce citizenship for fingerprint voters? I don’t know. Make it punishable by flogging. Or deportation. That’s a joke. Nobody gets deported. Flogging it is.

Some of you are no doubt thinking that voter fraud isn’t statistically significant — but even if that’s correct, it’s not the point. The point is to make the legitimacy of the election obvious beyond 99% of efforts to disprove it. Call it the “Caesar’s wife” standard. Good election policies are also poisonous to post-election challenges, because they remove areas of doubt that are fertile ground for those challenges. If you can prove who all the voters were, then “2000 Mules”-style allegations of mass ballot harvesting are rendered ridiculous on their face.

Don’t look for any of this to happen — because fully accountable and verifiable elections are the last thing that anybody wants. They’d rather have ambiguity, because it’s a “power leak”. It takes the decision out of your hands and gives it to: David Boies, Clarence Thomas, all the people who pulled the shades down on the voting offices and emerged hours later with a very different vote total. Ambiguity harvests power, it demands funding, it enshrines the established.

I have very little love for the Democratic or Republican parties but I reserve my greatest animosity for the superdelegates of Team Blue who primarily exist for the purpose of keeping a Jesse Jackson, or a Bernie Sanders, out of the top slot. The existence of superdelegates is a slap to the face of every voter. It is an explicit statement that some animals are more equal than others — ironically, precisely the problem that other parts of the 14th Amendment were designed to prevent. The Colorado decision is superdelegating taken to the greatest extreme. It should be chastised with all possible haste. As Finesse2Tymes might say: It’s not cool when they do it. Fuck ‘em.