Papered Over

Recently, the Colorado State Supreme Court issued a ruling that, in effect, states three things:

1. That the events of January 6th, 2021 constitute an insurrection against the United States of America.
2. Then lame-duck President Donald Trump participated in the above insurrection.
3. The Presidency of the United States is an office of the government of the United States.

And because the court found the three above statements to be true:

• Donald Trump is no longer eligible to hold political office in the United States.

As a result, the court has said that Mr Trump is ineligible to be on the primary ballot for the Colorado presidential primary. There's been a lot of back and forth about this, and one of the arguments that comes up quite often is that the voting public should be allowed to vote for whomever they please. I find this be be a strange argument, mainly because it's more or less unique to this circumstance. It's never been argued that former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger should be allowed to run for President, and have his name on ballots, even though he's ineligible to serve. If not meeting some of the Constitution's requirements for eligibility to be President mean not having one's name on ballots, why would others be any different?

But honestly, none of this is the least bit worthwhile. The Constitution, the United States Criminal Code, policy, regulation, all of it; they are all simply words on a page. When I was younger, and people would bring up the fact that this or that group had some or another right under the Constitution, I would rather testily remind them that: "The Constitution doesn't protect anything. People have to do that." And American history is full of examples of the Constitution being ignored because it was in enough people's interests to ignore it.

The secret to Donald Trump's success as a politician (and I doubt that he is alone in this) is that he has been able to convince people to count his being in office as one of the things that they understand themselves to be entitled to as a matter of right and wrong. And one of the big reasons that drove ignoring the the Constitution is that it's provisions went against what people understood to be their rightful entitlements.

The United States, like most nations, really, is a nation of laws only in so far as the public sees those laws to be operating to their benefit. Part of the reason why none of the myriad charges that Donald Trump is facing right now have made a dent in his voter base is that those voters perceive the charges against him a a deliberate misuse of the law in order to deprive them of someone who actually cares about them and their success. As the saying goes, this isn't rocket science. Commentators who insist that Donald Trump is somehow managing to defy the laws of political gravity are, as far as I'm concerned, very unclear on how political gravity actually works. The current system exists, not because it is somehow just or morally correct, but because people, either actively or passively, approve of it. Once that approval is eroded, all bets are off. Regardless of what anyone, or any court, has to say about it.