An Inevitable Next Step
You don’t have to like Trump, and I don’t, to recognize that a state Supreme Court declaring that the front-runner by a huge margin for the Republican nomination will not be allowed to appear on the primary ballot in Colorado is an ominous escalation in what my readers already knew for a long time: we no longer live in a republic where the people have even the pretense of a say in their own governance. In an unassailable two party political system, if one of those parties isn’t allowed to play? The last vestige of living in a free country evaporates.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that former President Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the state’s primary ballot.
The extraordinary 4-3 ruling makes Colorado the first and only state to disqualify President Trump from appearing on a state primary ballot. The decision revolved around an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which bars certain individuals from public office if they have engaged in an “insurrection.”….
….”We conclude that because President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Secretary to list President Trump as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot,” reads the majority opinion.
“Therefore, the Secretary may not list President Trump’s name on the 2024 presidential primary ballot, nor may she count any write-in votes cast for him,” the order added, as Colorado state law does not permit write-in votes to be counted for ineligible candidates.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/colorado-disqualifies-trump-from-appearing-on-primary-ballot-5547236
That Trump has not been found guilt of “insurrection” seems irrelevant. The “Justices” of the Colorado Supreme Court have declared him guilty of a crime that he has not been actually charged with….
Not only can he not appear on the ballot but apparently the Secretary of State is barred by the ruling from counting write-in ballots for Trump. This is being done in the name of preserving democracy, where democracy means you can vote all you like but you may only vote for the candidates your betters permit you to vote for. Saying you are a champion of “democracy” doesn’t mean anything. North Korea is officially the DPRK, or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but it is a “hereditary dictatorship” where the only person you really can vote for is the dictator that is the son of the prior dictator.
Lots of people are writing about this and better than I will and I also assume the Supreme Court will step in to stop this, so I want to instead think about the broader ramifications of the ruling. There is a concerted “lawfare” effort to deny Donald Trump the Presidency and it circumvents the electoral process entirely. This is not happening in a vacuum, instead it is a part of a broader effort that has been going on for 150 years to bring to heel the pesky American people with their inconvenient tendency to think for themselves and respond violently to being told what to do.
There is an old saying that claims there are four boxes that form the foundation of liberty: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box and that we ought to “use them in that order”.
The soap box represents free speech, the freedom of assembly and the right to petition the government. This is enshrined as the very first of the amendments to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In other words we can get up on a soap box and tell the President he is an asshole. The Federal government cannot interfere with peaceful gatherings nor may it attempt to control the press. Nor can the Federal government tell you how or who to worship, or even that you must worship at all. Free and open political discourse via the “soap box” is critical to our representative form of democracy.
The soap box is being systematically undermined, via blatantly unconstitutional “hate speech” laws, censorship in the academy and often via a public-private partnership such as what we saw in 2020 when social media companies were working hand-in-glove to promote some speech while suppressing or even banning other political speech.
Immediately following the soap box is the ballot box, or the right to vote to elect people to represent us, as we live in a republic rather than a true democracy. It is an article of faith that the American people vote for the President and Congress, often electing idiots and scoundrels along with a few truly evil people, but we voted for them. The United States was supposed to be the great experiment where our leaders were elected rather than being hereditary, said to govern by the will of the people rather than by divine right.
Many normies began to discover in 2020 that the right to vote is a farce and many people are realizing that it has been for a long time. To paraphrase the quote attributed to Joseph Stalin , it doesn’t matter who casts the votes, it only matters who counts the votes. Or as others have said, if voting mattered they wouldn’t let us do it. If Colorado succeeds, it will be the most blatant move yet to show the peasants that we only get to vote for who They let us vote for and therefore the sacred ballot box is rendered meaningless.
When the system isn’t working the way it should or some injustice is committed, we are promised the right to seek justice via the jury box. Americans are supposed to “have their day in court” where we make our case to an impartial jury in public, not via some secret tribunal. If someone accuses you, you have a right to face that accuser in an open court. This is preserved in the Sixth Amendment….
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
A significant percent of the Bill of Rights focuses on your legal rights, the Fourth deals with things like how your property and person can be searched, the Fifth with indictments via a Grand Jury, the Seventh with civil suits and the Eighth with appropriate bail, fines and punishment for crimes. Clearly the Founders realized that preserving the rights of the people was critical to balance against the necessity of legal actions. In a free society the burden is on the state to prove your guilt and it has always been understood that this means that sometimes the guilty will go free in order to ensure that the innocent are not jailed.
That started to go out the window in 1992 when the officers involved in the Rodney King traffic stop and arrest were acquitted of the charges against them, sparking riots in Los Angeles, but then quickly were indicted for Federal charges of “violating his civil rights”, an intentionally broad and vague term that can mean almost anything when a black is a “victim” and mean absolutely nothing when the victim is White.
It has only gotten worse since then, with political prisoners like James Fields, Derek Chauvin, Greg and Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan among others being incarcerated for various bullshit “crimes” in order to stave off black rioting. Meanwhile others are given the proverbial slap on the wrist for committing actual crimes. The last vestiges of the notion that the justice system was a final bulwark against government abuse went out the window with the ongoing detention and torture of political prisoners in an America gulag for the “crime” of unauthorized tourism on January 6th. The decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to disenfranchise Republican voters in Colorado is just the most wanton example but it certainly won’t be the last as many states are attempting to disenfranchise voters as well.
That leaves us with only one box to fall back on, the cartridge box, representing the use of violence as a last resort and when all else fails. It harkens back to the Declaration of Independence. After a lengthy listing of more than two dozen grievances against King George III we read:
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
The language of the First Amendment, “…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, echoes these words and our situation today is similar. Having been systematically stripped of our right to free speech via the soap box, of our right to choose our own leaders via the ballot box and of the right to fair and impartial trials to right the wrongs against us in the jury box, we are left only with the fourth box: the cartridge box. If the peaceable means to assert our rights are taken away, we must take the harder road. The only question is when.
We all realize that for most of us things aren’t personally severe enough yet to step over the line and the costs to doing so are greater than we are willing to take on. Posts like this invariably attract anonymous internet tough guys who rail against others for not “doing something” when those same anonymous internet tough guys are also not doing anything. At least in my case I am saying what needs to be said, and doing so openly and under my own name, knowing that it not only has closed off many vocational opportunities but also puts me at real risk. I don’t claim that makes me especially courageous, but it does give me a place to tell the anonymous internet tough guys to put up or shut the fuck up.
The time is growing closer with each new attack like the Colorado decision and we can all look at a calendar and see that 2024 is just over two weeks away. The Iowa caucuses are 26 days from now, and the New Hampshire primary is just 8 days after that. Your vote is meaningless but what They will do to prevent Orange Man Bad from slipping back into office quite likely will impact you even if you are sitting out this election. That means being prepared now, physically and mentally, for what you might have to do.
This isn’t the path most of us wanted. Had They simply been content to leave us alone, we could have lived our lives in obscurity and peace, but that isn’t how They work. With all other peaceable avenues closed off to us, there is only one path forward and I sense we are standing just shy of the first step that will inexorably lead to settling this thing that has been festering for over a century, once and for all.