You don’t “aid” someone by literally doing nothing. That is laughable nonsense.
Here is the “aid and abet” legal entry on Cornell’s web site:
This case from California, explains that “a person ‘aids and abets’ the commission of a crime when he or she, acting with knowledge of the unlawful purpose of the perpetrator; and the intent or purpose of committing, encouraging, or facilitating the commission of the offense, by act or advice aids, promotes, encourages or instigates the commission of the crime.”
That seems like a reasonable standard to me. Doing nothing is absolutely not inclusive.
Now, when he was standing in front of the angry mob and whipping them up into a frenzy, telling them to march on the capitol and fight because this is war, at that time you could say he “promotes, encourages or instigates the commission of the crime”.
It’s my understanding, and i may be wrong, that there is a process and a date by which the primary ballots must be approved with of list of qualified candidates. There a similar process and date for the general election ballots.
So either a secretary of state proactively says, “I’m not putting trump on the ballot because he’s not qualified to appear” or maybe a citizen or group sues to force the secretary of state’s hand before the ballots are approved (either primary, general, or both). Then the courts get involved because it’s an active question.
There have been lawsuits in the recent past to keep Obama off the ballot for the whole “birther” conspiracy and to keep Ted Cruz of the ballot because he was born in Canada. I’m not sure exactly how those were handled, though i know how they were resolved. I’ll have to look in to that.
Dereliction of duty is absolutely a problem, obviously. And I think in this specific case that it goes to show intent. He chose to not do anything for hours, clearly he wanted them to ransack the capitol and threaten lawmakers. But again, that isn’t in isolation an example of “aiding” someone.
I don’t think this has been posted in this thread. Someone is appealing to SCOTUS to disqualify Trump for election under Amendment 14, Sec 3. The person is a tax attorney named John Castro who has filed paperwork with the FEC to run for president as a Republican. That presumably gives him standing, even if he doesn’t actually do any campaigning or even get a single vote. The Supremes are going to have a conference on the 26th about whether to grant certatori:
Of course, it’s also possible that they find that each state government can decide for themselves whether a candidate meets the condition of having committed sedition or not, and thereby preserve a situation where he’s on some ballots but not others. Never underestimate the ability of a final arbiter to say “Don’t ask me; let someone else decide”.
That would really be a worst case scenario, I think. Talk about partisan fighting! Blocked from some states and not others… It would probably fall out that he would be blocked in states he wouldn’t have won anyway, so no upside there.
In that scenario (50 states decide individually) there will certainly be a lot of correlation. But as we see right now in GA, just becasue a state is red does not guarantee that it has totally lost it’s friggin’ mind and all respect for the law and history.
Plus, all those downballot races matter. They probably actually matter even more than the Presidency. If even half of the Republican House and Senate seats in blue states had gone the other way, we’d currently be in a very different political landscape.
A thing that is quite disturbing about all these efforts to move things to Federal court is how much that indicates the Reactionary Wacko Traitor party believes they have successfully suborned the federal judiciary.
A thing that is much more disturbing is that they may well be right. Or at least right enough that the current crop of crooked judges can keep things moving farther in that direction until the RWT locks in permanent control.
I feel the 14th amendment is counter-productive here.
Yes Trump engaged in (and continues to engage in) insurrection / rebellion. Yes I normally agree we should always uphold the law, no matter what, and with no possible “but” that could possibly come after this sentence.
But, this is one time where upholding the law will make all the problems worse. It’s a rhetorical boon for Trump and the loonie caucus. It will make a duped electorate that is angry about all the wrong things more angry. And with how close things are, I think it is entirely possible he could win as a write-in.
Televised court cases are the only way I can see that the fog of ignorance gets dissipated. Taking him off the ballot won’t help.
For those interested, the federal docket, where you can see many of the documents filed in the action, can be found here.
One interesting feature (or is it a bug?) of the Court Listener system is that they append the Docket number (in this instance, 1:23-cv-02291) with the initials of the Justice the case is assigned to. The Justice here is Philip A. Brimmer, the Chief Justice of the Colorado District (appointed by G. W. Bush), so at the top of each page downloaded from Court Listener has the heading “Case No. 1:23-cv-02291-PAB …”
I just have to chuckle each time I see it. How I wish the acronym PAB was more widely known in particularly Republican, circles.
Just for entertainment value, if you have the spare time, you might want to read the State Court Petition (115 page pdf) filed in Federal Court as Exhibit 2 to his filing for Removal by Trump’s legal team. Below is the Table of Contents:
FACTUAL BACKGROUND …13
I. Before the 2020 election, Donald Trump lays the groundwork to reject the election results if he loses and deploy political violence to stay in power. …13
II. After the 2020 election, President Trump refuses to admit defeat and inflames his supporters with the lie that the election was stolen from them. …22
III. President Trump leads a broad-based effort to pressure, coerce, and intimidate state and local officials to unlawfully overturn the 2020 election results. …29
IV. President Trump oversees a scheme to send fake slates of presidential electors to Congress and pressures Vice President Pence to unlawfully obstruct the January 6th certification proceeding based on those fake electoral slates. …37
V. President Trump summons tens of thousands of enraged supporters, including violent extremists, to travel to Washington, D.C. for a “wild” protest on January 6th to “Stop the Steal.” …41
VI. A violent mob summoned, incited, and aided by President Trump attacks the U.S. Capitol to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power. …60
Yes, Trump’s team made this part of the Federal Record.
I don’t think so. There are a few states that let you write in anyone you want. But only about 8 or 10 do that. Others, the write-in candidate has to register. If he’s declared ineligible to be on the ballot, it’s likely he’d be ineligible to register as a write-in. And then some states don’t allow write-ins at all.
Checking Wikipedia, I find that three states do not allow write-ins for President (AR, NM, and SC), four states don’t allow it for any position (LA, NV, OK, and SD) and Mississippi only allows write-ins for positions where a candidate has withdrawn for some reason. Because most of those states are red, a Trump write-in campaign will start at a severe disadvantage.
Of course, the legislatures in those states could modify their write-in rules before the election, so don’t necessarily count him out of those states. It’s just another hurdle he’d have to get over to win by write-in.
If a deep blue state were to kick Trump off the ballot, it is certain that there would be an objection to that state’s electors when Congress meets to count the electoral votes (remember how fun that was last time?). In order to reject the electors certified by a state’s certifying authority, it requires majorities of both the House and Senate to sustain the objection. Currently Democrats control the Senate, but it will be the incoming Congress that conducts the count. Republicans are in a strong position to take the Senate next year, and if they hold the House they would potentially be able to reject that state’s electors.
Depending on the margin, the result would likely be that no candidate receives an electoral college majority and it goes to a contingent election in the House – where Trump would be well positioned to win.
From what I’ve been reading, they’re not in a “strong” position. It’s just that since the Democrats only have a 1 seat advantage, it won’t take much for them to take it.
But it’s far from a certainty, so I wouldn’t call it a given by any means. And recall that in 2022, the “Red Wave” was coming, when the Senate was an even split. The actual result was that the Republicans lost a seat.
The eight most likely Senate seats to flip all have Democratic incumbents, with three of them in deep red states that will vote for the GOP nominee. In the last two Presidential cycles, only one state split their vote in the Presidential and Senate races. The odds strongly favor the GOP picking up two seats (or one and the White House) to form a Senate majority.
Of course, nothing’s certain, but I’m content with saying they’re in a “strong” position.
I’d like to read the best case someone could make for enforcing the 14th Amendment involving a president running for re-election and losing who acted in a way that clearly led to a failed insurrection but that Trump did not do.
In other words, it was only the failure of Trump’s insurrection attempt that might excuse him from the charge of leading an insurrection. Other than failing at it, he did everything a sitting President might do to stage a coup.
And if he’d succeeded, of course, he could use the government he runs to suppress any charges of insurrection.
So tell me specific things he could have done, but didn’t do, that constitute insurrection.