2021-12-30T06:00:00Z
[quote=“Novelty_Bobble, post:20, topic:956617, full:true”]
Certainly seems like sedition to me.
Nothing would give me greater pleasure to see him up in court but I fancy it’ll be something of a circus and runs the risk of making him a martyr.
However, I also think showing that the system works in general and anti-democratic attacks don’t go unpunished is even more important.[/quote]
somethings need repeating
One of my concerns is that investigation of the sedition plot will get hung up on trying to tie all the post-election events together into one coherent plan to overturn the election. This effort, IMHO, will fail because this was not one coherent plan.
The sedition was structured like a reality show episode, where various teams pursued their own schemes to overthrow the election and win the favor of King Trump. At times the paths of these groups crossed, at times they worked together — and at other times they were at cross-purposes, at times they sabotaged each other.
There was Team Guiliani’s plan to get the courts to invalidate the election by challenging the legality of election procedures in critical states.
There was the Sidney Powell faction, pursuing pre-existing conspiracy theories of rigged voting machines and foreign interference.
There was the Mark Meadows / Cleta Mitchell plan to pressure state officials to invalidate the election results from their states.
There was the Jeffrey Clark / John Eastman plan to send false information from the DOJ declaring the election corrupt.
There was the plan by the Republican Congress to pressure Mike Pence and/or run out the clock on the certification of the vote.
There was the Mike Flynn QANON plan to basically cause havoc and declare martial law.
…….I may have missed some, but I think I got most of it.
The January 6th insurrection served the interest of some of these seditionists. It trashed the plans of others.
Within the various seditionist plots I’ve listed, there were (IMHO) plenty of illegal actions, such as wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
But I am concerned that the people that want to see consequences for these actions will make the same mistakes they made with Trump/Russia — hanging everything on proving the one thing that can’t be proved and might not be true.
With Trump/Russia, it was that Trump had personally and knowingly worked with the Russian government to secure his victory. With the election fraud scam, it is that Trump deliberately raised a mob to storm the halls of Congress as part of a larger plan.
I think there should be lots of prosecutions over the insurrection - but please don’t make into a situation where Trump is vindicated because the prosecutors and the public are hung up on nailing Trump to the wall for everything.
Trump gave Top Secret information to the Russians.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of giving Top Secret information to the Russians.
The Rosenbergs were executed.
OK, you have convinced me. Execute him. First thing tomorrow morning, to start the year in style.
Putting aside questions over the criminal charges, I believe there is a strong argument that Trump has made himself ineligible to run for President again.
The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Had Trump taken an oath as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution? Yes, quite publicly on January 20, 2017.
Did an insurrection against the Constitution occur? Yes, on January 6, 2021.
Did Trump give aid or comfort to those insurrectionists? I think the evidence is yes.
There’s the necessary steps. Trump is constitutionally unable to hold any office in the federal or state level unless Congress chooses to pardon him.
We’d have to charge his enablers and him. If future Presidents don’t have to take pause before trying this again, but the henchmen get harshly punished, there would still be people willing to fill the executive offices. It’s just that the people willing to do so for someone with traitorous tendencies would be limited to those who know about the potential consequences and don’t care, either due to partisan true belief or a confidence in their ability to destroy democracy and thus invalidate any future punishment.
So while the advantage to narrowing the applicant pool would be less competent and less institutionally-connected lackeys, the disadvantage might be to paradoxically increase the chance of shenanigans. And there would be a danger of getting a true believer who is connected enough that they are likely to be listened to when ordering something blatantly unconstitutional,
I have no idea what that is in your post, or how you got it there, but it doesn’t seem relevant to this discussion?
I’m not suggesting that Trump be executed. (I’m against Capital Punishment.) I’m just saying that he gave secrets to an adversary, just like the Rosenbergs were convicted of doing. It’s the same crime. The only difference is that a President can decide to declassify anything he wants. In essence, ‘The President cannot commit Treason,’ if you take that line of thinking to its extreme.
What is that evidence? AFAIK, he told them he’d march with them, then waddled with his security team over to his vehicle to sip a Diet Coke and go sulk somewhere else. He then weakly told them to “go home” after they started smashing stuff.
I wouldn’t be shocked to see evidence that he coordinated with protesters, Proud Boys, etc. But I haven’t heard that it has been uncovered yet.
IANAL so I don’t know what the legal standard is for finding that somebody “gave comfort” to insurrectionists. But I feel that the President giving the insurrectionists a speech and telling them he supported them would qualify even if it was a typical Trump empty promise than he had no plan on following through on. Even if Trump had no plan to actually help the insurrectionists, the fact that he told them he would could qualify as encouraging them to act.
Remember, that occurred before the attack.
He could plausibly deny that he knew what they were going to do. Hell, maybe he personally really didn’t know at that time. (He should have, but I don’t think he sees the world through a fully-functioning lens.)
Proving he gave the speech with full intent to cause them to attack would take evidence, and if they have that it hasn’t been announced yet.
I don’t think that helps Trump’s case. If he had spoken to the insurrectionists after their attack, he could argue that they had acted on their own initiative and nothing he said afterwards could have had any effect on a crime that had already occurred.
But by showing that Trump addressed the insurrectionists before the attack and gave them verbal support, it can be argued that his verbal support was part of the cause of the attack.
I don’t think that works; you can’t support something that hasn’t even happened. That doesn’t even make sense. 
You’re also ignoring that these weren’t enemies of the US. Yes, in a philosophical sense they are, but legally they have to be a hostile foreign power. US citizens acting on their own initiative aren’t “enemies”.
This video helps quite a bit (and it’s entertaining as well as informative):
Sure it does. That’s how incitement works. By definition, it’s something you do before a crime occurs.
I disagree. The text reads “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The word thereof means “the thing just described.” So in this context, enemies has been defined as people who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion. And this is the Constitution so that definition can’t be superseded by some other source.
You’re wrong.
But enemies are defined very precisely under American treason law. An enemy is a nation or an organization with which the United States is in a declared or open war . Nations with whom we are formally at peace, such as Russia, are not enemies. (Indeed, a treason prosecution naming Russia as an enemy would be tantamount to a declaration of war.)
Please, watch the video I linked earlier, you are making incorrect assumptions.
Trust me, I’d love an excuse to deny him the ability to hold power again but legally this isn’t it. Not unless there’s something more concrete.
Interestingly enough, here is an attempt to use the 14th amendment to prevent anyone involved in January 6 from holding office:
Note that the bill only addresses people directly involved in the violence of the attack itself, which we know Trump wasn’t involved in.
Here is a law blog talking about it:
It makes it clear that disqualification of Trump under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is pretty difficult to establish:
The president presents the most challenging example. Further investigation may reveal more about his actions before and during the violence. Whatever those facts disclose, some of the legal issues are clear. First, there is no federal statutory enforcement authority for Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Without congressional action on that front, the ex-president could argue—if he runs for office again and is denied ballot access in a state—that Section 3 may not be applied to him, relying on Chief Justice Chase’s reasoning. State election statutes may refer to the federal constitutional requirements for eligibility to serve as president, but they may not refer to Section 3 specifically. I am unsure about what the law in each state says on this question.
Further, the ex-president can contest any Section 3 ineligibility claim in court, no matter what Congress does. This is because, as noted above, a concurrent resolution by Congress or a statute declaring someone ineligible under Section 3 does not make that person ineligible. Congress can only express its opinion on that constitutional point, backed by any record it might assemble, and expect deference from the courts. But expecting is not the same as guaranteeing. The former president could argue, for instance, that what occurred at the Capitol was not an insurrection, that his role in that event does not mean that he was “engaged in insurrection,” or that the presidency is a unique office that is simply not covered by Section 3.
It mentions that Section 3 was cited as one of the justifications for his second impeachment, and that if the impeachment does not succeed in conviction, it would weaken future attempts to use it as a disqualification. Of course, we know it did in fact fail to convict him. So that complicates the issue too.
This is far from a slam dunk and more of a pretty long shot.
History has taught us that it is very easy to say that person X did this bad thing and that this bad thing hurt the ruling order, therefore “treason.” The Constitution makes a point of pigeonholing this very serious charge into hard and concrete things like “levying war” and “giving aid and comfort to enemies.”
If you define “aid and comfort” or “enemies” broadly to mean bad things, then that construction just brings back the broad definition we don’t like.
What’s to stop Republicans from charging a random Dem politician with “treason” for supporting gun laws or “socialism” or some such thing. The law is working exactly how it should in this situation.
It really isn’t even about Trump. I doubt if this was a school board meeting and a speaker outside said similar things that you could convict the speaker of any crime at all. Whether Trump should be president is a completely different issue.
No, you’re missing the point I am making.
This has nothing to do with treason. So the definition of treason is irrelevant.
I am talking about being constitutionally ineligible to hold office. This is not about any criminal charges.
The Constitution has set several standards for being eligible to be President. You have to be a natural born citizen. You must be at least thirty-five years old. You have to have resided in the country for at least fourteen years. And you cannot have given aid or comfort to insurrectionists or rebels while holding an office for which you took an oath to uphold the Constitution.
The Constitution is a law. Congress doesn’t have to declare the Constitution is in effect; it’s in effect when it’s ratified. Congress also doesn’t have to declare somebody is ineligible. It’s the same as if Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to run for President. Congress doesn’t have to declare that he’s ineligible because he was born in Austria. Schwarzenegger simply is ineligible because he’s not a natural born citizen.
That’s not how the law works. Someone has to enforce the law. Who does the enforcement, and how, and who determines what constitutes what insurrection is? Who determines what “aid or comfort” is? You’re making it sound really easy when it’s not. Read the articles I posted earlier.
Most likely it would take both Congress, and the courts to separately determine ineligibility. Most likely they’d determine in Congress that he was ineligible, then his lawyers would take it to court.
Frankly. unless new information came out, what you’re proposing is fantasy. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell for him to be barred from running again. Did you forget that they went through an attempt to impeach him, as he was already on his way out of the office (as he had lost the election)? They scrambled to do so, because that is a way in which they could have barred him from being eligible to hold office again based on Section 3. That effort failed, and that ship has sailed.