Democrats are cheering the decision of Colorado's Supreme Court to ban former President Donald Trump from the Republican presidential primary ballot. By a 4-3 vote, Colorado judges banned Trump on the grounds that he was disqualified by reason of having engaged in an "insurrection." The framers of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment were referencing the Civil War when they drafted the provision that Colorado's Supreme Court relied on to take their unprecedented step, and indeed, many Democrats truly believe the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and various efforts by Republicans to challenge the 2020 election results really was an illegal rebellion comparable to the Civil War. But many more Democrats simply think a second Trump administration would mark the end of democracy, and have committed to barring him by any means necessary.
The idea that a Colorado court can brand anyone as an insurrectionary without due process of law or having been convicted of such a crime, is, as the Colorado Supreme Court dissenters noted, a legal absurdity. And therein lies the irony: All the arguments we've been hearing from Democrats and their corporate media cheerleaders about defending the nation from Trumpian authoritarianism is pure projection. Taking Trump off the ballot is itself an attempt to not just thwart democracy but to essentially set up an authoritarian model for elections in which the rulers decide who may run against them regardless of the will of the people.
Consider that Trump wasn't indicted by any of the various Democratic prosecutors seeking to imprison him for inciting the Capitol riot for the very good reason that, despite some irresponsible rhetoric, he had not met the legal criteria for doing so. The point of the insurrection clause in the amendment was not about protesting the results of a close election. It was to prevent those who had taken part in an armed rebellion against the government of the United States, which Trump clearly did not do, even if one accepts the dubious leap of partisan imagination needed to elevate the legal protest that turned into a riot on Jan. 6, 2021 into the moral equivalent of the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter.
The same applies to the conspiracy theory, boosted by the show trial hearings of the House Democrats' Jan. 6 Committee, in which legal efforts to challenge the 2020 results, including via stratagems that have been employed by Democrats in the past, was part of a vast insurrection.
Both accusations are wrong.
Trump may have exercised poor judgment in the months after the November 2020 election. But it's also true that the normal guardrails concerning voter integrity were largely abandoned in that election due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Democratic eagerness to mobilize their supporters. The efforts of Democrats and their Big Tech oligarch supporters to suppress news about Biden family corruption scandals to stop Trump also gave Republicans reason to regard the outcome as unfair if not technically fraudulent.
But whether you love Trump or hate him, the idea that we don't need to try and convict him of a crime before applying a legal penalty is a complete contradiction of Western legal tradition. The only reason this is being attempted is that Democrats don't trust the American people to defeat Trump in a rematch with Biden.
Waving the bloody shirt of Jan. 6 is an argument for voting against Trump, but it is not a legitimate excuse to subvert democracy. For the courts to employ a novel legal theory in order to disqualify the leading candidate of one of our two major parties is a blatant attempt to circumvent the democratic process.
When that happens in places like Russia or Iran, where Vladimir Putin and the Islamist ayatollahs have banned opposition candidates they feared, we know what to call it. It's tyranny.
Democrats think they get a pass for their anti-democratic tactics because of their conviction that Trump is the next coming of Adolf Hitler. They haven't yet figured out that half the country loves Trump's hyperbolic pronouncements on various issues precisely because it outrages the liberal chattering classes. Meanwhile, they fail to remember their own effort to overturn Trump's presidency via the Russian collusion hoax.
Most of all, they are profoundly mistaken to view Trump's populist approach to the issues as authoritarianism. His vow to seek to change the system so as to prevent a liberal-dominated federal bureaucracy from sabotaging his efforts to govern is inherently democratic, not tyrannical.
As we've seen with the various bogus indictments of Trump that Democrats have initiated, their efforts to prevent him from running is only convincing more Americans that he must be re-elected, if only to show the liberal elites that they can't take away the electorate's right to choose the president.
Those who care about defending democracy can only hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down this disgraceful effort to rig the 2024 election and that at least one of that body's three liberals will join the conservatives in doing so.
The lesson here is clear: The more the Democrats show us that they believe that the American people aren't smart enough to make the right choice next November, the more certain will be their defeat.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
