The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 11
This week:
- Everyone saw it coming except the MSNBC leftists
- Braun is light-years ahead of all opponents for IN-GOV
- California’s primary system works as designed
Outlook
None are so blind: We’ve all seen this movie before. And you’d think the parties involved would have learned.
But of course, they didn’t learn. They still haven’t.
Ever since the rise of Donald Trump, liberals have become conspicuously invested in various public forms of wish-fulfillment. In 2017 and 2018, they thoroughly convinced themselves that Trump and his campaigners had colluded with agents of the Russian Federation to win the 2016 election. They were so convinced that they nearly lost their minds when Robert Mueller’s 2019 report came out finding no evidence of any such collusion. This not only dashed their dreams, but rendered worthless most of the commentary they had spent their time generating and listening to over the first two years of Trump’s administration. Rachel Maddow’s career might never recover.
Well, it just happened again. Except that this time, the repudiation comes in the form of a unanimous Supreme Court decision — precisely the brutal decision that everyone with a lick of common sense was already expecting.
President 2024
Trump Ballot Case: In today’s divided America, if the Supreme Court rules against you unanimously, it is a sign that your argument was not even to be taken seriously; that it was risible, stupid, even.
Over the last year, Democrats and a small number of highly motivated legal scholars had concocted a theory about the Fourteenth Amendment’s Insurrection Clause, under which they claimed that Trump could be automatically excluded from the ballot of any state whose public officials were willing to deem him an “insurrectionist,” with neither an act of Congress providing for such a process nor any judicial decision against him.
Of course, this theory had a lot of obvious problems from the start. For one thing, if true, this would be the only case allowed by the Constitution where someone can be deprived of rights without any legal process whatsoever. It would also fly in the face of “innocent until proven guilty.” Indeed, this would contradict the plain language of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which states that “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Another problem is that anyone — not just Trump, but anyone — could be forced off any state’s ballot using the exact same rationale. If all it takes is for someone with a state office to claim that you are an insurrectionist — again, with no judicial or legal process required to determine guilt — then anyone can be banned from the ballot overnight.
Seriously — think about Joe Biden. Just imagine if Republican election officials in Florida, Iowa, and Georgia simply decided, for this year’s election, without any legal procedure, that Biden committed an insurrection when (let’s say) he refused to enforce federal immigration law. Remember — the accusation doesn’t have to be well-grounded, sensible, or even rational. It just has to be voiced to take effect, according to these brilliant theorists.
Those states could simply kick Biden off the ballot as a form of retaliation, and that’s that. Sorry, Joe — your path to re-election is now nearly closed.
Under this theory, in which liberals (even supposed legal experts) foolishly placed all of their hopes, the say-so of a single state official would have become omnipotent in presidential election terms. Some random dimwit Secretary of State or board of elections functionary — perhaps someone who has been appointed and not even elected to office — would supposedly be capable of deciding that any candidate he or she dislikes is a treasonous criminal and therefore ineligible to appear on a ballot for federal office.
Last week, we finally got the widely expected and (by Supreme Court standards) very quick unanimous ruling from the nine justices that it just ain’t so. No, state officials cannot simply deem someone guilty of a crime by decree, rendering them ipso facto ineligible to run for office.
The meltdown that liberals have suffered in the wake of this 9-0 ruling only serves to highlight the quality of the punditry-slash-journalism environment in which most of them live day-to-day. As with the Mueller report, their opinionated bubbleworld, normally impervious to facts and reality, deflates very rapidly when punctured. They were so eager to see Trump thrown off the ballot for “insurrection” that they couldn’t let something as inconvenient as the Constitution or reality get in the way.
Not even the supposed experts among them saw it coming, even though all nine justices’ attitude toward this legal theory was evident when oral arguments were being heard last month. This evinces a political movement that is on its way to a very rough 2024. And just imagine what another four years of this could look like.
State of Biden’s presidency: In the week after Biden’s extremely odd State of the Union, it must be added that Biden’s polling situation is a lot worse than it appears. We have pointed this out repeatedly, but others are now catching up as well. “Biden may need to win the popular vote by as many as 5 or 6 points to prevail in the Electoral College,” National Journal observes. “He’s nowhere close.”
In both elections where he ran, Trump outperformed his polls. He also won one and came very close to winning a second Electoral College victory with a popular vote minority.
Trump almost never led in a single poll in 2020, and nearly won; he leads in most national polls now.
As for the states, Biden continues to languish. The latest poll shows in drawing a pathetic 42 percent support in Minnesota, underperforming Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) by seven points. Although that is good enough for a four-point lead over Trump at the movement, it is an extremely low number for an incumbent and it puts yet another “safe” Blue state in play.
As Biden showed in his State of the Union, Democrats’ only real hope is to cling to the issue of abortion and hope it propels them to a less disappointing finish than all the other indications are pointing to.
Governor 2024
Indiana: A new poll shows Sen. Mike Braun (R) far ahead of all comers in the GOP primary for governor with 34 percent. That may not sound like an impressive total for the best-recognized candidate in the open primary, but it is head and shoulders above Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch and former president of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation Eric Doden, who languish in the single-digits. With Republicans apparently powerless to stop him and Indiana Democrats utterly demoralized and weakened by a decade-long political drought, Braun is the odds on favorite.
Senate 2024
California: Rep. Katie Porter (D) is determined that California’s primary was “rigged” against her. Her act of “insurrection” in making such an observation in her concession speech had been pre-punished by voters.
Her real problem is that she was out-hustled by Rep. Adam Schiff (D), who saw the importance of spending to turn out Republican voters in order to set himself up against Republican baseball great Steve Garvey (R) this fall instead of against a fellow Democrat.
Far from being a dirty trick, this is precisely the sort of chicanery that California’s badly designed top-two primary system has been accommodating ever since its adoption. If you don’t like it, your best recourse is to change the system so that each party can nominate its own candidate in the future. Or at least, that’s a lot more effective than whining.
In all honesty, Porter was not even very close to winning a spot on the fall ballot, with both Schiff and Garvey receiving more than twice as many votes as she did. With 75 percent of the votes counted as of Monday morning, she was languishing below 15 percent, which wasn’t going to be enough to get her on the November ballot either way.
New Jersey: Sen. Robert Menendez (D), who faces very credible corruption charges and is likely to be convicted before the coming election, has announced that he will not run for re-election. However, he will not resign early, either so as to let himself be replaced by appointment.
This cannot come as a big surprise. It frees up Rep. Andy Kim (D) and Garden State First Lady Tammy Murphy (D) to compete for the seat without nearly as much baggage weighing down the Democratic Party. In a way, Mendendez’s decision not to step aside makes life easier for Gov. Phil Murphy (D), who will not face any uncomfortable choices of whenther to appoint his own wife.
