The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Prof. Samuel Moyn (Yale Law): "The Supreme Court Should Overturn the Colorado Ruling Unanimously"
A N.Y. Times opinion piece today, following up on a Compact piece ("The Liberal Plot Against Democracy") Wednesday. An excerpt from the Times:
Like many of my fellow liberals, I would love to live in a country where Americans had never elected Mr. Trump — let alone sided with him by the millions in his claims that he won an election he lost, and that he did nothing wrong afterward. But nobody lives in that America. For all the power the institution has arrogated, the Supreme Court cannot bring that fantasy into being. To bar Mr. Trump from the ballot now would be the wrong way to show him to the exits of the political system, after all these years of strife.
And from Compact:
The [Colorado Supreme Court] ruling sets up a dangerous new version of an all-too-familiar scenario: It transforms what ought to be a national referendum on the future of the country into a national spectacle of how judges will interpret a provision from its past. Doing so might for a moment save liberals—and, if the US Supreme Court goes along, conservatives, too—from their nonnegotiable responsibility to win power by winning elections. But it would do so by putting the very democracy such forces purport to want to save at greater risk and only postpones the need to rule by legitimate means, rather than through legal hijinks.
As with the Adam Unikowsky article, I pass this along because it strikes me as interesting and thoughtful, though there are facets of the analysis with which I may well disagree.
