RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/03/05/supreme-court-trump-ballot-unanimous-ruling-election/72843559007/

“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.” Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election.

The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.

During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons,” when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

As More described England, the United States also is “planted thick with laws, from coast to coast.” The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.

After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.”

Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory “unassailable” and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.

Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”

Think what you want about Trump.But even liberal justices agree Trump should stay on ballot. Progressives still melted down.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/04/donald-trump-supreme-court-colorado-ballot-us-election/

“Scarcely any question arises in the United States which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate.” So Tocqueville wrote 200 years ago in what is still the greatest book about both America and democracy. His observation remains as true today as it was in the 1830s. It applies to the likely nominees of both political parties.

Most of attention has been devoted, quite rightly, to the mountain of legal problems facing former President Trump. But it is worth noting that the current occupant of the White House faces legal problems of his own. 

Joe Biden has been shown to possess classified documents without authorization and store them in insecure places, like his garage. The allegations were laid out in detail by Special Counsel Robert Hur, who declined to prosecute because President Biden was “elderly” and “forgetful” : hardly the sort of descriptors a presidental candidate would want to promote. 

Troubling as President Biden’s cognitive problems are, his legal issues are dwarfed by those facing former President Trump. The former president’s supporters and many independent voters see them a “lawfare,” the tendentious use of the legal system for political gain. His opponents see them as the even-handed rule of law.

What is striking about the cases pending against Trump is how they all came together in the midst of a presidential campaign. Surprise, surprise. Of course, the alleged crimes and civil violations occurred years ago.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-v-anderson-supreme-court-opinion-9-0-colorado-ballot-presidential-election-7486b815?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision Monday restoring Donald Trump on Colorado’s presidential ballot is no surprise after the oral argument in Trump v. Anderson last month. But it’s still a landmark, and a victory for the Constitution and democracy over partisan lawfare.

The Justices overturned a 4-3 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court that invoked Section 3 of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment, which bars candidates from holding federal or state office if they have engaged in an “insurrection or rebellion.” An Illinois state judge and the Maine secretary of state have also ruled Mr. Trump ineligible, though other states have differed.

The High Court cleared up the confusion in robust fashion in an unsigned per curiam opinion that went to the heart of federal versus state power in determining the qualifications for candidates. Letting states enforce Section 3, the Court explains, would create a “patchwork” of electoral policies that would “‘sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States’ as a whole.”

“Conflicting state outcomes concerning the same candidate could result not just from differing views of the merits, but from variations in state law governing the proceedings,” the Court adds. “Some States might allow a Section 3 challenge to succeed based on a preponderance of the evidence, while others might require a heightened showing.”

This peril is particularly grave for the Presidency, which “represent[s] all the voters in the Nation,” the Court stresses. States could remove candidates at different times, which “could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties and States.”

Imagine the uproar that would ensue if a judge or election official in a swing state disqualified Mr. Trump after he won the election. “Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos—arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration,” the Court writes.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/joe-biden-old-ny-times/2024/03/03/id/1155760/

A shocking new Siena College poll released by The New York Times revealed an overwhelming majority — 73% — of Americans say Biden is “too old to be an effective president” and that included even 61% of his 2020 voters.

The Times’ glaring headline warned the polling results were a “grave threat” for his reelection. Former President Donald Trump trolled the Times and Biden for the results in his Saturday night campaign rally in Richmond, Virginia.

“I’m running for president and leading big in all the polls,” Trump told his rally, which aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax. “I mean, when The New York Times has this front page story tomorrow — you’ll see, it just came out — Trump is killing this guy.

“They’re not happy. I guess, maybe they are happy. I mean, frankly, they did the best they’ve ever done four years of Trump. They were doing much better than they do right now.”

But Biden is not doing better even with his voters, the Times noted Sunday morning as Trump predicted.

“The survey pointed to a fundamental shift in how voters who backed Mr. Biden four years ago have come to see him,” according to the Times analysis. “A striking 61% said they thought he was ‘just too old’ to be an effective president.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/04/gearing-up-for-biden-versus-trump-not-if-but-when-and-how-to-replace-biden/

President Joe Biden is declining at a geometric, not an arithmetic, rate. His cognitive challenges are multifaceted.

His gait is shaky. His daily use of stairs now risks the chance of a tenure-ending fall. Even when he sticks to the teleprompter, he so slurs his speech, mispronounces words, and glides his syntax that at times he becomes as incomprehensible at the podium as he is unsteady in his step.

He now speaks a strange language foreign and untranslatable to most Americans. White House transcribers leave hiatuses in their written texts of his remarks to reflect that they either have no idea what he said, do not wish to publicize their guesses at what he said, or do not wish the public to know what he was trying to say.

Despite the circling-the-wagons media and the passive-aggressive sycophants like the opportunistic Gov. Gavin Newsom in waiting, the left understands that Biden will be lucky to get to the August convention. This spring and early summer, he will not campaign as a normal presidential candidate, and this time around, there is no pretense of the COVID epidemic to excuse his absence.

The people have already polled numerous times that their president is unfit to serve now and, in the future, should not run. So the 2020 Faustian bargain is in shambles. Remember its quid pro quos: all the major Democratic presidential candidates of 2020 nearly simultaneously pulled out the primaries to coronate Biden—but only on the condition that Biden would play to the hilt his “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” schtick that would offer a veneer to the otherwise unpopular hard left agenda of the new Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/the Obamas/Squad Democratic Party.

The people voted for a “return to normalcy,” all while the left destroyed the southern border, unleashed a critical legal theory/George-Soros crime wave, dismantled hard-won deterrence abroad, and printed money to spur hyperinflation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/panic-time-for-democrats-trump-biden-election-polls-08ef51ef?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The bedwetter caucus is back, to borrow the dismissive phrase from Barack Obama strategist David Plouffe about Democrats who fret about President Biden’s re-election odds. A spate of pre-Super Tuesday polls suggest that fretting could soon turn to wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Four major polls rolled out in the past few days, and Mr. Biden is losing to Donald Trump in all of them. He’s down two points in a head-to-head matchup in the Wall Street Journal and Fox News surveys, more if you include third- or fourth-party candidates. He’s down five points in the Siena-New York Times poll, and he’s getting crushed in the swing states in the Bloomberg News survey.

Worse is the public mood. A quarter or less of Americans think the country is moving in the right direction, and they think Mr. Biden’s Presidency has done more harm than good. They think Mr. Biden is too old to be President, and they view Mr. Trump’s Presidency far more favorably than they do Mr. Biden’s.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/03/election-countdown-trump-surges-in-swing-states-amid-legal-turmoil/

When is Jack Smith’s birthday?  Someone should give him a copy of the Justice Department’s manual with a bookmark in Section 9-85.500 “Actions that may have an impact on Election.” He and his boss, Attorney General Merrick Garland, can open their office reading group by having someone read the beginning of that passage aloud: “Federal prosecutors and agents may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

But, of course, that is exactly what Jack Smith intended to do with his case against Donald Trump in Washington, DC.  Trump was set to go on trial March 4, the day before Super Tuesday, in what is one of the most Democratic cities in the country, in a court presided over by Tanya Chutkan, an ostentatiously Trump-hostile judge.  As Byron York noted, “Democrats envisioned a weekslong trial tying Trump down in a federal courtroom, followed by a guilty verdict from a deep-blue Washington, D.C., jury, followed by a long sentence imposed by Chutkan, followed by a move by Smith to imprison Trump pending appeal. Bingo! Trump would be behind bars by Labor Day, and Biden would cruise to victory.”

A few days ago, the Supreme Court wrecked this envisioned party by agreeing to hear Trump’s case that, as president on January 6, 2021, he enjoyed immunity from criminal prosecution.  SCOTUS agreed to expedite the case, but no one expects them to finish before the election in November.

Of course, Trump is being besieged on many other fronts.  There’s the $450 million Judge Arthur Engoron says he must pay because… because why? Oh, right, because he defrauded banks by overvaluing his assets when he made loan applications.  The banks did their own arithmetic, made the loans, and were pleased that Trump paid them back on time and in full.  So it was a fraud in which no one was defrauded, but Trump still must be fined into possible bankruptcy.  While we’re shopping for our legal friends, someone should get Engoron a large-type version of the 8th Amendment, which is brief and to the point: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/11/unhinged-progressives-are-a-gift-to-trump/

In 1931, the slogan of the German Communist Party became: ‘After Hitler, our turn.’ This kind of wishful thinking is making a comeback in contemporary America. Prominent Democrats and the ‘progressive’ apparat of the Biden administration see the nomination of Donald Trump – their version of Hitler – as the best way to mobilise their shaky coalition and to keep hold of power.

Biden’s supporters believe Trump is so odious that the American people will accept anyone – even someone as obviously mediocre as Joe Biden – to keep him out of power. This worked back in 2020, when Trump’s bungling of Covid-19, his chaotic management style and his consistently vile – though clearly not fascist – persona allowed Biden to gain the White House.

This assumption also proved correct in the 2022 Midterms. Democrats bankrolled numerous unelectable Trumpistas in congressional and state races, a cynical gambit they are repeating again this year. This helped them dodge a potential wipeout at the polls. The seemingly inevitable nomination of Trump by the Republicans looks perfectly suited to a repeat performance in the 2024 presidential election.

Yet as the German Communists learned in 1933, sometimes getting what you want does not always work out so well. Biden might be heralded as the second coming of FDR in the mainstream press, but most Americans have clearly had enough of him. A recent poll puts him at a dismal 37 per cent. As things stand, he is now slated to lose to Trump, particularly in key swing states. Some surveys suggest Trump is even gaining among independents and is pulling some suburban professionals back into his camp. As former presidential candidate Andrew Yang puts it, Biden’s shaky performance could be about to deliver ‘Trump, the sequel’.

So why is Biden so unpopular? This is partly down to inflation – undoubtedly made worse by Biden’s economic agenda. But it is also due to his pandering to the so-called progressives on just about everything – from the border and climate change to LGBT issues. According to longtime Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira, Biden seems incapable of shifting to where the voters are. For Democratic senator Joe Manchin, much of the problem stems from the fact that the president has surrounded himself with ‘far, far-left liberals’.

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnullyot/2024/02/13/obama-poised-to-pull-the-plug-on-biden-n2635143

Special counsel Robert Hur did a great service to America last week in two ways that fundamentally and irreversibly transform the Presidential race. As a result, just like in Hillary Clinton’s ‘3 a.m. phone call’ television ad in the 2008 contest, the iPhone is buzzing in Barack Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard compound, and he had better answer it.

Number one, by declining to charge President Biden for “willfully retain[ing]” classified materials, Hur blew up any pretense of fairness when it comes to how Biden’s Department of Justice treats its own boss, while it throws the book at President Trump.

 Not only did Hur decline to prosecute Biden, he made clear that the facts surrounding Biden’s retention of documents were far worse – not even in the same solar system – compared with President Trump’s case.

To review the bidding:

– As a former President, Trump was covered by the Presidential Records Act that allows the chief executive to retain some personal records from his time in office, as it did with former President Bill Clinton in the infamous “socks case,” as well as “broad authority to formally declassify most documents that are not statutorily protected, while they are in office,” according to the American Bar Association. As a former senator and vice president, Biden was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, and has no case whatsoever for retaining classified personal materials from his time in either office.

– Biden had no protection whatsoever over his custody of the classified documents he possessed illegally, many of which he squirreled away in his unlocked garage next to a non-electric Corvette. President Trump’s documents were kept under lock and key at his Mar-a-Lago estate that even some in the media acknowledge is “built like a fortress,” and guarded around-the-clock by Secret Service officers.

– Hur’s report noted that Biden’s documents were recovered by FBI agents “from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home,” and at the Penn Biden Center, Biden’s lucrative Washington perch after leaving office in 2017. (This latter facility is otherwise known as the “Penn China Center,” because the University of Pennsylvania mysteriously received at least $30 million from anonymous Chinese donors within weeks of establishing the center for Biden and his former aides the year he left office, including future Secretary of State Antony Blinken.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/14/whats-with-these-dems-are-stuck-with-biden-stories-appearing-in-the-press/

In the span of two days, articles started appearing making the exact same argument: That Joe Biden will definitely, no questions asked, be the nominee come November.

So, naturally, we are left wondering what Democrats have up their sleeve to get the flailing president off the ballot.

On Monday, Vox.com published a lengthy article titled “Yes, Democrats, It’s Biden or Bust.”  The next day, Politico ran a lengthy piece titled “Get Used to It: Biden Isn’t Going Anywhere.” New York Magazine ran a piece with a slightly different take: “Yes, Democrats Can Still Replace Biden (But They Won’t).” The National Interest ran a piece yesterday titled “Democrats are Stuck with Joe Biden.”

We are not suggesting there was plagiarism here, but mainstream journalists aren’t the most independent thinkers on the planet, which suggests that they are getting their information from the same sources.

Let’s focus on the Vox and Politico articles.

Both point out that it’s too late for a challenger to get enough delegates to secure the nomination.