Greenwald: The Grave Insanity of Colorado Court's Ruling

The Collapse of the Roman Empire

From Glenn Greenwald's Site on Locals: A transcript of his video posting

"The establishment effort to avoid facing Donald Trump before the electorate at the ballot box saw one of its gravest and most unprecedented escalations yet. Just as Trump rises to his highest point yet in polling for 2024 and as Biden sings to his worst level of disapproval yet, a state court in Colorado full of Democratic Party-appointed judges just decided yesterday by a 4 to 3 ruling that Trump is ineligible to appear on the Colorado Republican presidential primary ballot. In the view of these four judges, he is guilty of being an insurrectionist and thus ineligible to run for the presidency under the 14th Amendment. 

There are so many grave and glaring flaws in the legal reasoning of this decision, which we will show you, but one need not have a law degree to detect its most significant error: Donald Trump, despite being indicted in four separate jurisdictions, has never once been charged with, let alone convicted of the crime of insurrection. Both DOJ special prosecutor Jack Smith, as well as the Democratic Party prosecutor in Atlanta, charged Trump with multiple felonies relating to his conduct regarding the 2020 election. And yet both of them, despite being able to do so, opted not to charge Trump with engaging in an insurrection or even inciting an insurrection. But no matter these four state court judges, without any of the due process required for judging someone guilty of a crime, have decreed that he is nonetheless guilty of that crime, one with which he has never even been charged and thus never had the opportunity to claim all of the constitutional safeguards guaranteed to someone when charged with a crime. 

As this court itself recognized, this ruling will almost certainly now be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. That's why they stayed the order until January 4 to give the court time to say whether it will rule on it or not. This is especially so since the same liberal advocacy groups that spearheaded this case in Colorado have done the same in at least 14 other states where they're trying to block the presidential frontrunner, meaning the person who more Americans say they want to be president next year, from even appearing on the ballot. Yet again, what we have here are the very same people, in politics and media, who endlessly glorify themselves as the Sole Guardians of American Democracy, relying on classically anti-democratic weapons to try to cling to political power. Beyond this ruling, Trump has been charged with felony counts in four other cases, the first one brought by a liberal prosecutor in Manhattan; the other state case brought by the Democratic Party machine prosecutor in Atlanta and then, the two federal cases brought by a special prosecutor under the auspices of the Biden Justice Department. 

Regardless of one's views on January 6 and Trump's conduct concerning it, it is beyond dispute now that the primary tactic of the Democratic Party and their media allies for winning in 2024 is not to convince voters to vote for them, but instead to imprison their chief political opponent and to prevent American citizens forcibly from voting for him. Whatever else this is, “saving democracy” most definitely has nothing to do with it. Quite the contrary: on top of the ongoing attempts to impose increasing levels of constraints on the expression of political speech, it is genuinely hard to imagine a more glaring and more dangerous full frontal assault on democratic values than what American liberals in the Democratic Party is doing to prevent Trump from running or even remaining free."