As President Trump Soars To New Heights, Biden Plunges To New Lows

By Paul Ingrassia

The fortunes of President Trump and Joe Biden could not have been more at odds this week.  In a year that has seen the Justice System abused and weaponized to no end by the Biden regime, finally, the Supreme Court seemed to offer a glimmer of hope for President Trump during Thursday’s oral argument for the Colorado Fourteenth Amendment case.

While a decision has not yet been handed down, the High Court appeared to be almost unanimously in agreement with the 45^th President’s legal position, at least based on the tenor of the questions.  This should be no surprise given the fact that 1) the Fourteenth Amendment patently does not apply to the events of January 6^th, 2021, for the all-important reason that 2) there was no “insurrection” waged against the United States government by President Trump or anyone else.

Thus, the case should have been dead on arrival.  In saner times, it would never have gone beyond being a crackpot theory of maybe a handful of lunatic law professors fulminating in their classrooms.  However, in an age in which the federal government has exacted an all-out assault against anyone who would so much as stand for the First Amendment and other sacred constitutional rights, including due process of law, the Supreme Court’s apparent sobriety and level-headed questioning of the issue before it was radically refreshing.

To start, President Trump was not charged, now or at any point, with the so-called crime of “Insurrection.” To the extent Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment has ever been invoked to exclude alleged “insurrectionists” from national office, it has only been selectively enforced alongside legislation expressly and contemporaneously enacted by Congress.  This issue was addressed in oral argument, where discussion of legislation enacted shortly after the Civil War, before the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified, that excluded former Confederate War Generals and other accomplices from certain elected positions, was had.  However, even in the aftermath of the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history, President Andrew Johnson pardoned and granted amnesty to all ex-Confederates in 1868, and multiple other amnesties were granted in subsequent decades by Congress and other legislative bodies to enable anyone who had rebelled against the Union to return to public service.

The events of January 6th should not even be in the same conversation as anything that occurred before, during, or after the Civil War and throughout the Reconstruction era.  That said, and incredulously, Congress was far more amenable to forgiving ex-Confederates in the years after the Civil War than they appear receptive to pardoning and forgiving those involved in the events of January 6^th today, which again, if commonsense had any say, would not even allow comparisons with the Civil War.

Fortunately, all this appeared to come to the surface during oral argument.  Of course, the Republican-appointed justices, especially Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch – were quick to make mincemeat of Colorado’s argument – including, the most obvious problem, the dangerous precedent it would set by allowing a rogue Secretary of State to unilaterally exclude a major presidential candidate from ballot access based on a subjective determination that the candidate engaged in “Insurrection.”  Of course, Colorado was scrambling to justify (because they could not justify) the who’s, what’s, or why’s of the central issue that would allow such a brazen power-grab to be made. In an extremely polarized and constitutionally illiterate age like ours, this would basically license any state official, anywhere, to exclude any major presidential candidate from office because of a petty political grievance – spelling certain doom for every presidential election from here on out.

Not only would that be a logistical nightmare for the Supreme Court, which would be forced to intervene on every decision and create a national standard for admissions of evidence and procedural rules for presidential elections that the Constitution expressly places under state control.  But it would be the actual end of democracy, allowing rogue actors who may not even be versed in constitutional law to make decisions themselves about whether someone engaged in Insurrection.  Of course, under the Fourteenth Amendment, the term Insurrection is narrowly circumscribed in time and place to the Civil War era – and the management of ex-Confederate officials.

The fact that it has not been invoked since the late 1860s does not speak to, as the state of Colorado’s counsel ludicrously claimed, the unprecedented nature of the January 6^th demonstration.  But rather it is telltale evidence that Section 3 only applied that history, and thus any attempt at extrapolating its meaning to anything other than an armed rebellion against the national government, that resulted in years long war and hundreds of thousands of lives lost, is an egregious act of historical revisionism.

Another issue that arose was the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to Presidents or deal with issues of presidential qualification, which belongs to Article II, Section 1.  Furthermore, the justices were puzzled that Colorado attempted to use the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed to augment federal power and diminish state power, for the opposite purpose: to allow individual states to decide who should and who should not be a national presidential candidate.  On this point, when probed about where the federal government comes into play here, Colorado’s attorneys had no answer other than to say it was the Supreme Court’s role to make a determination.

On paper, the Case should be a slam-dunk for President Trump.  Whether or not the Court rules unanimously, as it should, in favor of President Trump, a decisive ruling, such as an 8-1 or 7-2 vote, would nevertheless bode well for President Trump in next week’s presidential immunity case.  There, the issue should be even more straightforward: if immunity is not granted to a president or former president, then, much like the ballot access decision, it would be the end of this country.  Every president will have every reason to prosecute his successor if he belongs to another party because the successor would have no immunity under the law to protect himself. No president would ever again step down and hand the reins of power to a successor of a different party again because your enemy would be licensed to go after you without limit, and the successor will have every reason to go after you to preserve their power and avoid the guns turning on them down the line.  It would also be an extreme deterrent to any rational minded person from running for president, because they would be entering the lion’s den of guaranteed political persecution.  In short, such a ruling would mark the end of constitutional governance and plunge the country into civil war.

The Supreme Court seems to recognize these potentially disastrous consequences, which is great news for President Trump and his legal team.

The news is made even sweeter by the fact that hours after news of the successful oral argument broke, Joe Biden on primetime television fumbled through a barely coherent speech.  The Oval Office occupier took pains to explain why he misallocated confidential documents, the very crime he and his justice department have made the basis of a criminal investigation against President Trump, which of course led to a precedent-shattering raid on Mar-a-Lago by the FBI in August of 2022.  Biden struck a shameless, vindictive chord: giving his best tinpot dictator impression by throwing his staff under the bus while not taking a morsel of responsibility for his criminality.  The press conference devolved into a Q & A about his cognitive abilities, where Biden at one and the same time swore that he was sharp as a tack while forgetting basic details, live on air, about the death of his late son, Beau Biden, such as when he died.  Further reports have confirmed Biden’s inability to remember when he served as Vice President or who the current president of France was, confusing Emmanuel Macron with Francois Mitterand in a campaign speech this week, who died in 1996.

Most Americans, even the majority of Democrats, agree that Biden is too old and too senile to carry out his duties as president.  However, he is as stubborn as he is forgetful.  The clock is ticking away, and the longer they hold out, the more and more likely that Biden will indeed be the Democratic nominee.  Thus, the 2020 rematch between Trump and Biden seems increasingly inevitable – but this time, the momentum is undeniably on Trump’s side, as revealed by the polling, and the public has slowly awakened to the fraud and corruption in our electoral procedures, at least to a much greater extent than four years ago.

Whatever hijinks may be going on in the court system, the visual juxtaposition of President Trump’s stamina and momentum with Biden’s malaise and lethargy could not be more stark.  In the court of public opinion, which is the ultimate arbiter of political things, Trump wins hands down: the image of legitimacy against illegitimacy, order against chaos, good against evil.

Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

 

 

 

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