Clown-show attempts to prevent Trump being on state ballots

What an absolute circus.

And not even a good circus. This is a tacky traveling circus, the kind with a midway full of carnival games that are not on the level.

I’m speaking, of course, about the three-ring spectacle of Democrats brazenly, cravenly, ludicrously trying to prevent the American people from having the opportunity to re-elect former president Donald J. Trump.

The latest development looks like one of those rigged games where people throw baseballs at stuffed clowns and try to knock them down, only to discover after great expense that they’re never going to win the big prize.

In the Colorado Supreme Court, baseball throwers succeeded in knocking over four clowns, justices who disqualified Trump from the Colorado primary ballot for “insurrection” under Section 3 of the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment. Three of the justices remained standing and refused to go along with casting Trump as a Confederate officer in “Gone With the Wind,” particularly noting “the absence of a criminal conviction for an insurrection-related offense.”

The court stayed its own ruling to allow for appeals, which could take months, so the ballots in Colorado will be printed with Trump’s name on them anyway.

Still, it made the mob on the midway feel better about itself.

So far, Colorado is the only state where the clowns fell over, but lawsuits and appeals are pending all over the country. None of it matters. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and no amount of baseball throwing is going to knock over a majority there.

Democrats are openly seeking a non-electoral method of blocking the former president from being re-elected. As soon as Trump made the official announcement of his candidacy, he was indicted over and over again, in multiple jurisdictions, on 91 ridiculous charges that twisted the law beyond recognition. It’s like a shooting gallery, where the object is to hit a moving duck and ring a bell. It doesn’t matter that it’s not a real gun and not a real duck. It’s a real bell, and everyone hears it.

But this hasn’t worked out the way Democrats, and many Republicans, hoped it would. The indictments didn’t hurt Trump in the polls. The mug shot didn’t hurt him in the polls. Instead every clang of the bell seems to have further convinced the American people to support Trump’s re-election.

Did the carnival barkers give up? Of course not.

Step right up to the next game, where Democrats are in court trying to knock Trump off the ballot.

The exact mechanism for this is an obscure provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars individuals from holding certain government offices if they “shall have engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution of the United States.

The Fourteenth Amendment was written by Congress in 1866, soon after the U.S. Civil War ended with the Confederacy’s surrender. You remember learning about the Civil War in school, right? It was that time when half the country seceded from the union to form a separate country where slavery was allowed, except that four slave states stayed in the union because everything you were taught about the Civil War was mostly wrong. But that’s not important now. What’s important is that “insurrection or rebellion” referred unambiguously to four bloody years of domestic ground war in a failed effort to divide the nation into two separate countries.

However you want to characterize what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it does not answer to the description of any “insurrection” that would have been recognized by the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment. A lot of Americans came to Washington, D.C., to hear President Trump give a fiery speech complaining that illegal votes had flipped the 2020 presidential election and arguing that somebody ought to do something about it.

Freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are protected by the Constitution, but the Democrats are certainly not going to court to get a ruling on that.

U.S. presidents are not elected by the popular vote. They’re elected by the votes of the Electoral College, a clunky method the framers of the Constitution developed after much debate and disagreement about the best way to balance the interests of the states and protect the election of the president from fraud, mischief and improper or foreign influence. The last step in the process is the certification by a joint session of Congress of the electoral votes from each state. Although it’s usually pretty routine, it’s not automatic. Lawmakers may object to the acceptance of a state’s electoral votes, and that has happened many times.

In 1960, Hawaii sent two rival slates of electors to Congress because there was a dispute about whether John Kennedy or Richard Nixon had won the state. That wasn’t an insurrection or a federal crime. It was the Electoral College system, in all its horse-drawn antiquity and clunkiness.

The use of the term “insurrection” instead of “riot” or “protest” to describe what happened on Jan. 6 is so wildly incorrect that a reasonable person could wonder if it was a deliberate effort to set up what we are seeing now: a multi-state effort to have courts declare that the presidential candidate leading in the polls is ineligible to be president because of the Fourteenth Amendment’s “insurrection” clause.

There is some good news. All the efforts to prevent Trump from running for president appear to provide confirmation that our elections are still real. Democrats wouldn’t have to embarrass themselves like this if election fraud was as easy and efficient as some people fear.

California’s primary is March 5. If you want to vote for any Republican in the primary, register to vote in the Republican Party. If you want to vote for Trump, go ahead. If you don’t, don’t.

Look at all the money I just saved you on attorney’s fees.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley