Why Is Trump Stalling Trials?

I hear a lot of politicians and pundits espouse that voters, not courts, should decide if Donald Trump should be president again.  As described in previous blogs, the 14th Amendment in clear text says he should not be allowed to be re-elected.  But courts are the place where Constitutional issues are resolved or at least we hope they would be resolved.

But if politicians and pundits believe so strongly that voters should decide Trump's fitness, why are they not calling for Trump to stop the judicial stalling?  If voters should decide the election, don't they have a right to know if Trump is guilty of any of the dozens of crimes he has been indicted for?  And know before the nomination and election?  If Trump is innocent it would be in his interest to get these trials over with.

If Trump is as innocent as he keeps telling us, he should fighting to get before a jury as soon as possible and be exonerated.

Silly me, I know why he is stalling.  He thinks the DOJ, the judicial system, jurors, the majority of voters, bankers, bus drivers, little old men, election workers, etc. are all against him.  The whole system, actually the whole world is against him and he can't possibly get a fair trial.

Truth is, he knows he is guilty as hell and will do anything to escape punishment for his crimes.

14th Amendment Was Written For Trump

After carefully reading the 14^th Amendment, Section 3, I was struck by how it seems to be perfectly written to fit the situation we currently find ourselves in.

I'm obviously not a Constitutional or legal scholar, but as I hear the comments from people who are experts I'm taken by how we are facing issues similar to those that legislators faced after the Civil War when the 14^th Amendment was written and adopted.

The South was defeated and brought back into the Union, but there were many southerners who would never concede they were wrong or they actually lost (sound familiar?). What was to stop these people from picking up where they left off before the war started and again elect people to state and federal offices to continue to try to break or harm the Union?  Congress believed laws were needed to prevent this. I've heard several ideas were floated and rejected before the 14^th Amendment was adopted (with some later changes). I'll admit the amendment language seems somewhat out of step with other parts of the Constitution, but I think it was intentional.

Let me conjecture why I think the amendment was written as it was and so clearly matches our current needs. The 14th Amendment applies to certain federal and state office holders (civil and military).  For this discussion I'm focusing primarily on the presidency.

The amendment says people are disqualified from holding office again "if previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States,... to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.".

These are people who have shown they can't be trusted.   They broke their oath.

The amendment does not require that an insurrectionist be convicted of a crime. I'm guessing that this may have been for several reasons.  The number of people who could have been taken to court for engaging in an insurrection or rebellion after the civil war would have been in the millions.  How could you find enough unbiased jurors in the south to hear the cases?  Most southerners were themselves insurrectionists or had given aid or comfort to an insurrectionist.

Another reason for not requiring a conviction was that in general it was obvious who was an insurrectionist.  Most people did not hide what they believed and what they did.  In fact they were defiantly proud of their actions.  Again, sound familiar?

Since the vast majority of the population of much of the country were obvious insurrectionists the authors set the bar low for disqualification. If a person has engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the U.S. the 14^th Amendment finds the person is disqualified from holding office again. That disqualification could then be appealed to Congress. This put the onus for prompt action to reverse their disqualification on the insurrectionist rather than on election officials or courts.

Why didn't the authors add text that said if an insurrectionist were elected by voters, that should override the disqualification language of the 14^th Amendment? As stated above, in former Confederate states, how many Confederate officers (civil or military) would be overwhelming elected or selected again?  Many voters would clearly believe that insurrectionists had done nothing wrong. They agreed with the insurrectionists. So the 14^th Amendment does not disqualify insurrectionists from voting, it just says you can't vote for a former insurrectionist. Punish the oath breakers not the average voter.

Trump brags that he could shoot someone in a public space and his followers would still vote for him. Or he could be convicted of a felony and they would vote for him. Those supporters are telling us clearly that many of them will vote for him even though his participation in an insurrection is obvious to anyone willing to objectively look at the facts. These voters seem to believe that a person who did not honor their oath to uphold the Constitution or the rule of law should be allowed to further damage our country.

Donald Trump publicly tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. If you don't believe that, you have to be willfully ignorant. On an almost daily basis he tells us how little he believes in the Constitution and the democratic institutions that have made us the leader of the world. He tells us how he will use his presidential and political power to remake our country. He had one term as president and we know how it went.  It ended with him trying to stop the peaceful transfer if power, a hallmark of our country

If we allow him to be elected again, and he begins to reshape our country in the illegal ways as he is promising, what do we do? (And no, he is not joking. Trump is only about Trump. Anything he says or does is just to help Trump.). Unless Democrats have super majorities in the House and Senate the constitutional solution of impeachment will not be an option (remember, we already tried that).  That will leave Donald Trump free to work very hard to remake this country in his image (as he is telling us he will) with few restrictions on his efforts. 

The Constitution make is clear that there are some candidates that are disqualified from holding office (age, citizenship, impeachment conviction, insurrection). Why should we make an exception for an insurrectionist Donald Trump?

14th Amendment Is Not Unfair to Trump Or Voters

This blog entry is a follow-on to my previous blog on whether the 14^th Amendment should be used to prevent Donald Trump from being president again.

Many Republicans believe that voters should be allowed to make the decision about Trump's fitness to be president again. They think it is unfair and possibly undemocratic to keep him off the ballot using the 14^th Amendment.

Of course they know that the Constitution disqualifies people from the presidency who were not citizens from birth or who are less then 35 years of age. I can only guess why the authors of those provisions thought it was important to include those restrictions in the Constitution. Certainly there are many foreign born, naturalized citizens who are obviously fully qualified to run for the position, but those restrictions are in the Constitution and will be enforced until they are amended.

Conviction in the Senate of impeachment carries the possibility of a sentence that includes the disqualification from holding office again.

So the argument that the use of the 14^th Amendment is merely a political maneuver by Democrats is false. Using the 14^th Amendment is proper use of Constitutional law just as disqualification based on age or citizenship status.

Should Voters Determine Trumps Fate?

Many Republicans are upset with the possibility that Donald Trump may not be allowed to run for the presidency because of his participation in an attempted insurrection. They believe the voters should decide whether or not he is fit to be president.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to that argument. But then I believe Al Gore and Hilary Clinton should have been president because more voters voted for them then for their opponents. Unfortunately, the Constitution and the archaic Electoral College dictated different winners.

I would be more sympathetic to Republican voter complaints of the unfairness of the 14^th Amendment if they coupled it with calls to replace the Electoral College with a simple counting of the votes for each ticket. 

I think the authors of the 14th Amendment specifically meant to exclude voters being allowed to vote for an insurrectionist candidate.  More to come...