The more down-ballot fiascoes the Rs suffer in the primaries, the greater the chance of a blue wave sweeping over all three elective parts of the government in the general. And since that would probably not occur, or at least not be so dramatic, if TFG were not supporting the looniest of those singing his tune, the analogy to Jonestown becomes stronger. TFG gives them the Koolaid they crave and winds up with a form of mass suicide.
North Carolina has a produced a bumper crop of weirdos this cycle from current Lt Gov. Mark Robinson, who thinks he's running for State Pastor instead of governor; to Addison McDowell, who can keep his Cheerwine - and mine. Stuff tastes like hyper-sweetened cough syrup.
This cycles has even this atheist asking y'all to pray for us, here in the Tarhell State.
Being in California, the biggest annoyance is that all three would be great senators, and yet we can only have one. Two senators for 40 million people just feels so unfair.
A damn shame they couldn't see that issue arising. Or maybe they could (Rhode Island vs. Virginia) and just couldn't get past it.
Since there's no way we're changing that part of the Constitution, I wonder if splitting large states is the answer. It'd take one party having both houses of congress and the Whitehouse or a big compromise, but it would get more representation out there.
I've got this alternate reality scenario in mind where states are completely redrawn so every state is centered around a large city, and you reallocate the surrounding rural areas to try and reach population parity.
That's why we have to vote MAGA out of any kind of national power. Then a majority of the country would be empowered to make sensible Constitutional changes.
It goes beyond that though. An article V convention is very vaguely defined. There are very few concrete rules governing how it should be run, how delegates are selected, etc.
Even if there wasn't a single MAGA representative at the federal level, you'd still have lots of bad actors at the state level, and people like billionaires looking to throw around their influence in harmful ways. It would be an incredibly dangerous thing at this moment in time. Even without MAGA, I'm not sure I trust the conservative elements in society to play fair. They certainly didn't prior to Trump, and there's no guarantee they will afterwards.
That's the way (from our perspective) the (un)(Fair Founding Fathers wanted it: Slaves were 3/5ths of a man and women, even with the last three letters, did not rate anywhere on that, or the voting, chart.
Women (and children) were always counted as whole persons in the apportionment calculus where the three-fifths bit resided. Apportionment is about residents, not voters or even citizens.
Joe noting the seismic shift from Giants to Dodgers in California Senate representation is a superb, if painful, hiding in plain sight, perceptual scoop. Garvey may finish second but is unlikely to get a single vote in 9-county Bay Area; besides Tommy Lasorda, he was most hated Dodger of that awful era. Beat L.A.
The fact that this court effectively overturned the Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendment is mind-blowing. Good thing that won't ever come back to bite us, eh?
Jane, I understand that feeling, but they did not overturn it. In fact, they did not go anywhere near the question. They stayed as far from any comment about that factual, legal finding from Judge Wallace that TFG was an insurrectionist as they could. So, he is still, and very probably always will be, a factual, legal insurrectionist, as well as a rapist, and fraudster. And that list of his good points is not yet complete.
I said they *effectively* overturned the Insurrection Clause. The court added requirements to Section 3 that aren't in the amendment. By doing so, they made it impossible to remove a federal candidate from the ballot in any state by eliding the insurrection part of the Insurrection Clause and instead deciding this was really an issue of state versus federal candidates and claiming that only congress can disqualify a federal candidate.
The court doesn't have the power to actually overturn a constitutional amendment, so they did so effectively, by making it impossible to enforce.
The plain reading of the amendment is that the disqualification exists, and the only role of Congress is to remove, if they wish, the disqualification with a two-thirds majority. The dissent refers to Trump as an "oathbreaking insurrectionist" four times. Clearly the justices did not agree, whether publicly or privately, that Trump was innocent. If it is really true that Section three cannot be enforced except by extra legislation from Congress, then it appears Congress needs to get busy and find all the toothless provisions of the Constitution and give them teeth. Good faith compliance is dead. Trump and MAGA killed it.
Thanks for the clarification of your meaning, and I understand what you are saying. Adding the distinction between state and federal candidates probably will fall under the "originalist" rubric that the Court loves to use when it increases federal power in the way they like. Of course, when it does not please them, they love the "originalist" thought behind States Rights, too. 😏
Though as a counterpoint, could it be as simple as passing a law to designate someone as an insurrectionist? Almost certainly not what the writers of that amendment had in mind, since they put in that 2/3 over-ride, which is the same thing needed to pass a law without the President. So why put that in there if a passed law was the only way to get it done? Unless of course it means that once an insurrection designation law is passed by 50%+1 and the President, it cannot be undone except by 2/3 of Congress?
The whole thing seems like a muddled mess to me, with the writers just assuming that everyone would know who the insurrectionists were and the current SC ignoring that obvious mistake.
It might be possible to pass a law defining 'insurrection' as it relates to the 14th Amendment, Section 3. It might also be possible to make that definition self-executing, as appears to be the original intent of the authors of Section 3. The 2/3 vote of each house is what the Section 3 calls for to override a disqualification due to participation in an insurrection against the Constitution. That could only be changed by another amendment.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, hundreds of confederates applied to congress for exemption from disqualification from running for office. They'd never been tried, let alone convicted, for insurrection. They didn't seem to think they had to wait until congress passed a law designating what 'insurrection' means. They knew.
But this court, clearly, didn't want to touch the insurrection part of the Insurrection Clause with a 10-foot pole, so they deflected. They pretended the real issue here is who gets to decide which candidates for which offices are the ballots in each state - despite the Constitution giving that authority to the states. [Which is particularly rich considering how Trump argued in many of his post-election cases that only state legislatures could decide issues about elections.]
What we ended up with is a political decision, not a legal one. The muddle here has been created by a supreme court whiffing on deciding the hard part and instead putting out an opinion on an issue nobody even raised - in briefs or in oral argument.
My assumption is that the Justices were internally debating which opinion and dissent(s) to issue, and realized at the weekend that they had run out of time before Super Tuesday and needed to rush something out.
On terms of the liberals, presumably this not-dissent may have started as a lone dissent but later got merged into the 3 justices agreeing on a message.
I was a Dodger fan in the 70’s and Garvey was an admired player. As I remembered it, he was squeak clean personality. Ah the Dodgers were a great time over the years. But then Garvey up and went to San Diego. That is when I started to dislike him! He had some personal troubles, but for a squeaky-clean guy, it appeared 2 faces of him. Let him go back where he came from.
As a life-long Reds fan, I remember Steve Garvey and the LAD's very well during the 1970's and the days of the Big Red Machine. With Cincinnati, somehow in the NL western division, Garvey had many big hits in a lot of exciting games. Politically, I'm glad to see Schiff on his way to the Senate.
"While either would be able to mount a more meaningful challenge to Schiff in a general election than the Republican Garvey, the uncelebrated baseballer is on track to go with Schiff into the two-person arena this fall after polls close this evening."
Yes, California is a deep blue state, but its voters are not homogeneous, there is a large contingent of Repubs in the state. With this in mind, I find it highly likely that Mr Garvey will be Mr Schiff's opponent in Nov. Schiff will get a solid plurality of the Dems voting, and Garvey will likely get almost all of the Repub votes. As noted, Ms Porter and Ms Lee combined are approximately polling the same as Schiff, and both are well behind Garvey. IMO as an outsider, the CA Senate race has been a two person event from the start.
No matter how close Garvey is to Schiff after tonight, it is still a moot point. As I and others have said, CA is a blue state, and I don't really think that it will go purple with the election of Mr Garvey -- it ain't gonna happen. Ms Porter's and Ms Lee's supporters will go with Schiff, especially Ms Lee's; she inhabits the left wing of the Dem party, and I just don't see progressives voting for a Repub backed by the Mango Malignancy.
I agree - lots of important primary elections down-ballot in these states, particularly California where the "jungle primary" system can cause a single party election in the fall. U.S. Senate and/or CA-22 U.S. House of Reps come to mind.
During the recent Focus Group Podcast Sarah indicates she is not a fan of Adam Schiff. While I understand and agree with Sarah's perspective on Gavin Newsome, I don't understand Sarah's perspective on Adam Schiff. I view Schiff as a serious / responsible person, and on balance more good than bad. Definitely more skills, knowledge, and abilities with Adam Schiff than with baseball hall-of-fame prospect Steve Garvey and other standard CA-caliber candidates like Larry Edler. Sarah, help me understand your objections to Schiff.
If Dems were a tit--for-tat party, as soon as they have a majority they would censure Comer and Jordan and remove them from committees for their stupid "impeachment inquiry" into Biden. After all the GOP used their majority to do so to Shiff even though Shiff actually had powerful evidence.
Joe, "jungle" primary is a derogatory term. Are you showing your dislike of California? I live in CA and I'm a long-time Bulwark subscriber. If so, you're not singing my song.
Please use more neutral terms. Like “top-two” primary.
Sandy…I did not know what a “ jungle “ primary was or that the term was derogatory for that matter, but I heard it used multiple times by news commentators on Tuesday when I was watching the results. (Just as information)
“Supreme control, alt, delete” is the most perfect heading I’ve seen in ages.
It sure is!
The more down-ballot fiascoes the Rs suffer in the primaries, the greater the chance of a blue wave sweeping over all three elective parts of the government in the general. And since that would probably not occur, or at least not be so dramatic, if TFG were not supporting the looniest of those singing his tune, the analogy to Jonestown becomes stronger. TFG gives them the Koolaid they crave and winds up with a form of mass suicide.
North Carolina has a produced a bumper crop of weirdos this cycle from current Lt Gov. Mark Robinson, who thinks he's running for State Pastor instead of governor; to Addison McDowell, who can keep his Cheerwine - and mine. Stuff tastes like hyper-sweetened cough syrup.
This cycles has even this atheist asking y'all to pray for us, here in the Tarhell State.
Being in California, the biggest annoyance is that all three would be great senators, and yet we can only have one. Two senators for 40 million people just feels so unfair.
A damn shame they couldn't see that issue arising. Or maybe they could (Rhode Island vs. Virginia) and just couldn't get past it.
Since there's no way we're changing that part of the Constitution, I wonder if splitting large states is the answer. It'd take one party having both houses of congress and the Whitehouse or a big compromise, but it would get more representation out there.
I've got this alternate reality scenario in mind where states are completely redrawn so every state is centered around a large city, and you reallocate the surrounding rural areas to try and reach population parity.
I'd like to see a National Constitutional Convention. That would be worth watching on CSPAN with a ton of popcorn.
Eh... While it would be really interesting, I'm not sure I want the stress of doing that while MAGA still exists.
That's why we have to vote MAGA out of any kind of national power. Then a majority of the country would be empowered to make sensible Constitutional changes.
It goes beyond that though. An article V convention is very vaguely defined. There are very few concrete rules governing how it should be run, how delegates are selected, etc.
Even if there wasn't a single MAGA representative at the federal level, you'd still have lots of bad actors at the state level, and people like billionaires looking to throw around their influence in harmful ways. It would be an incredibly dangerous thing at this moment in time. Even without MAGA, I'm not sure I trust the conservative elements in society to play fair. They certainly didn't prior to Trump, and there's no guarantee they will afterwards.
That's the way (from our perspective) the (un)(Fair Founding Fathers wanted it: Slaves were 3/5ths of a man and women, even with the last three letters, did not rate anywhere on that, or the voting, chart.
Women (and children) were always counted as whole persons in the apportionment calculus where the three-fifths bit resided. Apportionment is about residents, not voters or even citizens.
Joe noting the seismic shift from Giants to Dodgers in California Senate representation is a superb, if painful, hiding in plain sight, perceptual scoop. Garvey may finish second but is unlikely to get a single vote in 9-county Bay Area; besides Tommy Lasorda, he was most hated Dodger of that awful era. Beat L.A.
Not to mention, Garvey is 75.
Hey, that's young by presidential candidate standards.😉
Hah!
Why was an opinion originally authored by a lone justice as a partial dissent transformed into a concurrence authored by all three liberals together?
A republican court in trying to look legitimate bungles itself into even more illegitimacy
The fact that this court effectively overturned the Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendment is mind-blowing. Good thing that won't ever come back to bite us, eh?
Jane, I understand that feeling, but they did not overturn it. In fact, they did not go anywhere near the question. They stayed as far from any comment about that factual, legal finding from Judge Wallace that TFG was an insurrectionist as they could. So, he is still, and very probably always will be, a factual, legal insurrectionist, as well as a rapist, and fraudster. And that list of his good points is not yet complete.
I said they *effectively* overturned the Insurrection Clause. The court added requirements to Section 3 that aren't in the amendment. By doing so, they made it impossible to remove a federal candidate from the ballot in any state by eliding the insurrection part of the Insurrection Clause and instead deciding this was really an issue of state versus federal candidates and claiming that only congress can disqualify a federal candidate.
The court doesn't have the power to actually overturn a constitutional amendment, so they did so effectively, by making it impossible to enforce.
The plain reading of the amendment is that the disqualification exists, and the only role of Congress is to remove, if they wish, the disqualification with a two-thirds majority. The dissent refers to Trump as an "oathbreaking insurrectionist" four times. Clearly the justices did not agree, whether publicly or privately, that Trump was innocent. If it is really true that Section three cannot be enforced except by extra legislation from Congress, then it appears Congress needs to get busy and find all the toothless provisions of the Constitution and give them teeth. Good faith compliance is dead. Trump and MAGA killed it.
You're absolutely right, Terry. Well said.
Thanks for the clarification of your meaning, and I understand what you are saying. Adding the distinction between state and federal candidates probably will fall under the "originalist" rubric that the Court loves to use when it increases federal power in the way they like. Of course, when it does not please them, they love the "originalist" thought behind States Rights, too. 😏
Well put!
Thanks. One can think of it as "moving the goalposts", too.
Though as a counterpoint, could it be as simple as passing a law to designate someone as an insurrectionist? Almost certainly not what the writers of that amendment had in mind, since they put in that 2/3 over-ride, which is the same thing needed to pass a law without the President. So why put that in there if a passed law was the only way to get it done? Unless of course it means that once an insurrection designation law is passed by 50%+1 and the President, it cannot be undone except by 2/3 of Congress?
The whole thing seems like a muddled mess to me, with the writers just assuming that everyone would know who the insurrectionists were and the current SC ignoring that obvious mistake.
It might be possible to pass a law defining 'insurrection' as it relates to the 14th Amendment, Section 3. It might also be possible to make that definition self-executing, as appears to be the original intent of the authors of Section 3. The 2/3 vote of each house is what the Section 3 calls for to override a disqualification due to participation in an insurrection against the Constitution. That could only be changed by another amendment.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, hundreds of confederates applied to congress for exemption from disqualification from running for office. They'd never been tried, let alone convicted, for insurrection. They didn't seem to think they had to wait until congress passed a law designating what 'insurrection' means. They knew.
But this court, clearly, didn't want to touch the insurrection part of the Insurrection Clause with a 10-foot pole, so they deflected. They pretended the real issue here is who gets to decide which candidates for which offices are the ballots in each state - despite the Constitution giving that authority to the states. [Which is particularly rich considering how Trump argued in many of his post-election cases that only state legislatures could decide issues about elections.]
What we ended up with is a political decision, not a legal one. The muddle here has been created by a supreme court whiffing on deciding the hard part and instead putting out an opinion on an issue nobody even raised - in briefs or in oral argument.
My assumption is that the Justices were internally debating which opinion and dissent(s) to issue, and realized at the weekend that they had run out of time before Super Tuesday and needed to rush something out.
On terms of the liberals, presumably this not-dissent may have started as a lone dissent but later got merged into the 3 justices agreeing on a message.
I was a Dodger fan in the 70’s and Garvey was an admired player. As I remembered it, he was squeak clean personality. Ah the Dodgers were a great time over the years. But then Garvey up and went to San Diego. That is when I started to dislike him! He had some personal troubles, but for a squeaky-clean guy, it appeared 2 faces of him. Let him go back where he came from.
Cheated on his wife and estranged from his kids. He’s a weird loser.
Those amount to qualifications in today's Republican Party...
Come on, Sheri, by current the current "R" presidential standards, he is minor league.
Sheri, you have principles. I respect that. Well done.
As a life-long Reds fan, I remember Steve Garvey and the LAD's very well during the 1970's and the days of the Big Red Machine. With Cincinnati, somehow in the NL western division, Garvey had many big hits in a lot of exciting games. Politically, I'm glad to see Schiff on his way to the Senate.
"While either would be able to mount a more meaningful challenge to Schiff in a general election than the Republican Garvey, the uncelebrated baseballer is on track to go with Schiff into the two-person arena this fall after polls close this evening."
Yes, California is a deep blue state, but its voters are not homogeneous, there is a large contingent of Repubs in the state. With this in mind, I find it highly likely that Mr Garvey will be Mr Schiff's opponent in Nov. Schiff will get a solid plurality of the Dems voting, and Garvey will likely get almost all of the Repub votes. As noted, Ms Porter and Ms Lee combined are approximately polling the same as Schiff, and both are well behind Garvey. IMO as an outsider, the CA Senate race has been a two person event from the start.
No matter how close Garvey is to Schiff after tonight, it is still a moot point. As I and others have said, CA is a blue state, and I don't really think that it will go purple with the election of Mr Garvey -- it ain't gonna happen. Ms Porter's and Ms Lee's supporters will go with Schiff, especially Ms Lee's; she inhabits the left wing of the Dem party, and I just don't see progressives voting for a Repub backed by the Mango Malignancy.
This is a guess and not a prediction.
fnord
I agree - lots of important primary elections down-ballot in these states, particularly California where the "jungle primary" system can cause a single party election in the fall. U.S. Senate and/or CA-22 U.S. House of Reps come to mind.
During the recent Focus Group Podcast Sarah indicates she is not a fan of Adam Schiff. While I understand and agree with Sarah's perspective on Gavin Newsome, I don't understand Sarah's perspective on Adam Schiff. I view Schiff as a serious / responsible person, and on balance more good than bad. Definitely more skills, knowledge, and abilities with Adam Schiff than with baseball hall-of-fame prospect Steve Garvey and other standard CA-caliber candidates like Larry Edler. Sarah, help me understand your objections to Schiff.
If Dems were a tit--for-tat party, as soon as they have a majority they would censure Comer and Jordan and remove them from committees for their stupid "impeachment inquiry" into Biden. After all the GOP used their majority to do so to Shiff even though Shiff actually had powerful evidence.
Joe, "jungle" primary is a derogatory term. Are you showing your dislike of California? I live in CA and I'm a long-time Bulwark subscriber. If so, you're not singing my song.
Please use more neutral terms. Like “top-two” primary.
Sandy…I did not know what a “ jungle “ primary was or that the term was derogatory for that matter, but I heard it used multiple times by news commentators on Tuesday when I was watching the results. (Just as information)
Yes, it is used a lot in the press.