Snow Day Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall

Another snow storm in Virginia, and thus I have another opportunity to make up for my meager use of seasonal songs in December as I tried to avoid reminding myself of what a lousy time my family was going through. I don’t really like Babs’s version of “Jingle Bells” —-I don’t really like Streisand (or her voice, as astounding as it was…or her style, of the song, for that matter), but you can’t say her rendition isn’t unique.

One housekeeping note: Sarah B. was kind enough to send me a friendly email asking me to stop posting Fani Willis’s name as “Wallis.”Among the myriad things I resent Willis for is that her last name is one of the letter combinations that I instinctively type wrong every damn time, along with “their,” “Michael,” and a few others. I will now do a search for “Wallis” any time a post concerns her, as will my next one, if all goes as planned. I just corrected 12 more “Wallis” typos in the December post about this creep, and the single “Wallis” in the last post yesterday, which I thought I had checked but missed the headline.

I’m sorry.

[WordPress’s AI bot told me to tag this one : “book review”….]

5 thoughts on “Snow Day Open Forum!”

  2. Here is a link to an amicus brief by Peter Meijer.

    Click to access 20240118093419790_Amicus%20Brief.pdf

    b. If the Majority Opinion Stands, Section Three Will Be Ripe for Leveraging as a Tool to Strike Political Opponents from the Ballot Further, the majority charts a clear path for political abuse. The Colorado Supreme Court’s application of Section Three was only made possible after the majority patched together legal meaning through an amalgam of unrelated and, at times, irrelevant sources. In the end, the court’s definition of “insurrection” as a “concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking [action]” is vague at best. Anderson, 2023 WL 8770111, at *39. The inevitable result of such a generalized and unworkable definition is that it enables courts (and secretaries of state) to loosen its meaning until cries of “insurrection” become as common as negative advertisements and smear campaigns that are nearubiquitous in our current political discourse. 21 The majority’s interpretation will be far more damaging in the long term than whatever former President Trump’s opponents think they might prevent, because “Section 3 is powerful and facially vague, making it an especially attractive cudgel for political warfare.” Lynch, supra, at 220. Broadening the Fourteenth Amendment understanding of insurrection from the bloodshed of a civil war or equivalent catastrophe will open the floodgates to tit-for-tat challenges without predictable standards, a particularly concerning result when coupled with the Colorado Supreme Court’s lack of concern about adequate enforcement procedures. Section Three will transform from a tool intended to disqualify from office Confederate soldiers and their ilk who actually engaged in armed rebellion against the United States into a tool of election interference to be used against political opponents. If President Trump’s rhetorical culpability for January 6 qualifies, the slippery slope of challenges against politicians that will inevitably result is not difficult to imagine. Left untouched, the Colorado Supreme Court majority opinion will open the door to widespread elimination of candidates for federal and state offices, so long as courts or secretaries of state can plausibly call that candidate’s previous activities as engaging in (or even providing aid or comfort to the participants of) insurrection. i. Representative Tlaib To start, take the recent actions of Representative Rashida Tlaib. It has already been argued that her actions on October 18, 2023—when she participated in an antiIsrael demonstration at the Capitol—amounted to an 22 “insurrection or rebellion” under Section Three.5 That day, Representative Tlaib spoke at a rally, and in her remarks she criticized Israeli military actions and falsely accused Israel of an attack on a civilian hospital several days prior. Hundreds of anti-Israel protestors gathered both inside and outside of the U.S. Capitol, and then engaged in a massive disruption inside a House office building, which forced Capitol Police to maintain order and to ensure that lawmakers could safely conduct business by arresting approximately 300 people.6 Based on her rhetoric and participation with the protest, Representative Tlaib was censured by the House of Representatives in a bipartisan vote. H.R. 845, 118th Cong. (2023). Given these facts, if the Colorado Supreme Court’s loose definition of insurrection is permitted to stand, Representative Tlaib’s political opponents could file suit on the theory that Tlaib incited a coordinated effort to illegally obstruct Congressional action in an effort to stop the government from supporting Israel. In fact, Representative Tlaib was censured by the House of Representatives. H.R. 845, 118th Cong. (2023). That censure explicitly recognized that “Israel is a critical ally to the American people and to our strategic national security interests the Middle East,” and that nevertheless, Representative Tlaib had engaged in the following activities: (1) “knowingly spread the false narrative that Israel intentionally bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17”; (2) “published on social media a video containing the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’, which is widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”; and (3) “doubled down on this call to violence by falsely describing [that phrase] as ‘an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence’”; and (4) “calling for the destruction of the state of Israel and dangerously promoting false narratives.” H.R. 845, 118th Cong. (2023). The language in Representative Tlaib’s censure could thus support the notion that she gave aid or comfort to an enemy to the United States, in violation of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. Armed with these facts (and if accomplished within the confines of Michigan election law), Representative Tlaib could be prevented from appearing on any future ballot. ii. President Biden and Vice President Harris Similarly, state officials could be called upon to grapple with whether President Biden and Vice President Harris engaged in insurrection or rebellion for their encouragement and support of the Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) riots in 2020. However spurious this argument may appear at first glance, it is true that the riots led to an 24 assault on the White House,7 the injury of Secret Service agents,8 murders at the hands of rioters, and the storming of government buildings.9 It could be argued that this “Biden-Harris rebellion” also led to “autonomous zones,” where insurrectionists declared independence from the United States Government. And according to the majority opinion, all of these issues could be sufficiently litigated in a truncated election proceeding. This issue becomes even more acute when one considers the potential overlay of the Insurrection Act, 10 U.S.C. §§ 251– 255, which permits the president in times of insurrection to engage the U.S. military against its own citizens. During the BLM riots, if former President Trump had decided to invoke those provisions, could that have been used to bolster the claim that President Biden and Vice President Harris were disqualified from running for reelection? Applying the Colorado Supreme Court’s flimsily evidentiary standard and expansive definition of what constitutes “engaging in insurrection,” it appears it likely. Anderson, 2023 WL 8770111, at *39. It follows that the invocation of the Insurrection Act could be weaponized as a pretext to set up a political opponent for disqualification under the Fourteenth Amendment.

    Reply

  3. Here is an interesting answer on Quora.

    https://www.quora.com/Many-red-states-have-unleashed-a-terror-attack-against-women-with-draconian-anti-abortion-laws-after-Roe-v-Wade-was-repealed-Will-they-face-a-backlash-such-as-people-businesses-leaving/answer/William-Barry-24

    Calling a law a terror attack is disrespectful to everyone who really died in a terror attack.

    Republicans waited until Democrats had abandoned “my body my choice” in favor of “everyone must take an experimental medical procedure or your employer faces thousands of dollars in fines”.

    Both parties are hypocritical and this is probably one of the loudest ways they embrace their hypocrisy.

    Reply

  4. Here is an interesting tweet to write about.

    the flip side is, as Jack had shown, some schools have forfeited their presumption of respect.

    Reply

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