Due process
This week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the Republican primary election ballot in Colorado. The ruling is one of many similar lawsuits filed across the country challenging Trump’s ballot access. The plaintiffs in these cases rely on a never before used legal theory citing the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment states, in relevant part, that no person shall hold any office under the United States who, having previously taken an oath 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. This clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted following the U.S. Civil War to prevent former U.S. officials who led their states in seceding from the Union from being subsequently elected to office in the reconstituted United States of America. The Colorado plaintiffs asserted that Donald Trumps actions on January 6 were “insurrection or rebellion” as contemplated by the Fourteenth Amendment. This raises fairly serious due process issues, among other problems. Trump was never convicted by the U.S. Senate for his January 6 actions. He has been charged criminally in Washinton D.C. out of those facts, but has also not been convicted there. The case in Colorado is a civil case with a preponderance of the evidence standard. Is that sufficient to prevent the public from being able to vote for a preferred presidential candidate? The deadline for ballot access in Colorado is January 5, 2024. Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on this issue prior to that date. This is a question only the Supreme Court can answer. Hopefully, they will expedite the appeal and answer soon.
Crime
Washington D.C., in which I have some vested interest, has experienced the sharpest rise in violent crime of any major city in the U.S. this year. The city experienced a 40% increase in violent crime in 2023 compared to 2022. Like the rest of the country, crime had been going down for 20 years, but then shot up significantly over the last several years. This is attributable in large part, if not entirely, to soft-on-crime policies.
Free speech
This month, the media outlets, The Daily Wire and The Federalist, joined the State of Texas in a lawsuit against the Biden Administration alleging free speech violations. It is reasonably clear at this point that the Executive branch has been involved in censoring conservative speech. Several lawsuits have been filed addressing this, including one currently on the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket. This lawsuit, though, is specifically aimed at the Biden State Department. The State Department oversees a federal agency called the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The GEC was founded in 2011 as a counterterrorism tool designed to monitor and counter foreign terror propaganda. The lawsuit alleges that the GEC has been used by the current administration to monitor and counter domestic speech. It was recently uncovered that the GEC maintains a list it calls the Dynamic Exclusion List, which contains names of media outlets that it claims present a “high risk of disinformation.” The list contains only conservative media outlets like The Daily Wire and The Federalist. The lawsuit claims that the GEC shares this list with activist groups such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, and that the GEC funds such groups through grants. The activist organizations then lead efforts to get advertisers to boycott the conservative media outlets using material acquired with the GEC’s counterterrorism digital tools. The lawsuit’s allegations may or may not turn out to be true. However, the activity alleged is consistent with other conservative speech-suppressing conduct of the Administration.