• ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    A Colorado judge has ruled that former President Donald Trump “engaged in an insurrection” on January 6, 2021, but rejected an attempt to remove him from the state’s 2024 primary ballot, finding that the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban” doesn’t apply to presidents

    Wallace concluded that “Trump engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 through incitement, and that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s speech” at the Ellipse that day. She also found that Trump “acted with the specific intent to disrupt the Electoral College certification of President Biden’s electoral victory through unlawful means.”

    The provision explicitly bans insurrectionists from serving as US senators, representatives, and even presidential electors – but it does not say anything about presidents. It says it covers “any office, civil or military, under the United States,” and Wallace ruled that this does not include the office of the presidency.

    “After considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States,’ did not include the President of the United States,” she wrote. “It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section Three did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”

    Please reread the article. I’ve quoted the relevant sections. The ruling has nothing to do with Trump needing to be convicted. The judge explicitly states that she believes that the office of the president is not covered by the phrase “any office, civil or military, under the United States” and therefore is not covered by section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

    This ruling benefits Trump to the detriment of us all. The ruling seems to be grounded in the idea that the president is above the law. This ruling is a symptom of the fascist movement that is trying to take over our country. We can not afford to misunderstand this ruling. We need to see it for what it is, another blow to the foundations of our democracy. edit: typo

    • Rottcodd@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Something fishy is going on here.

      At the time I posted that response, the article included a whole section of her ruling in which she said that it must be a certain fact that he engaged in insurrection, and that it cannot yet be called a certain fact, and that she is not empowered to decide that it is - that that’s a matter for the appropriate courts to decide.

      And all of that is now gone.

      I’ll have to see if I can find it elsewhere, because it was there.

      • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 months ago

        I would be interested to see whatever article or version of an article that you saw. I recommend googling whatever phrases from the article you can remember and also checking the Wayback Machine. Their web scrappers might have picked up an earlier version of the article.

        https://archive.org/web/

        I looked up the CNN article. This is what they had.

        https://web.archive.org/web/20231118000000*/https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/politics/trump-colorado-ballot-14th-amendment-insurrection/index.html

        12:19 snapshot

        23:21 snapshot

        I put the snapshots in diff checker and they seem to be the same. I then put one of the snapshots against the current article based on text I got from Reading Mode and while they are different, they don’t seem to be different in the way you are describing.

        • Rottcodd@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Yeah - I already did a rudimentary version of that (just searching - not going through the Wayback Machine though, and thanks for doing that), and didn’t find anything

          I’m positive it was there. My first reaction was actually that the judge must’ve come up with some bullshit excuse to not make the obvious ruling, likely because she didn’t have the guts to go through with it, either because she didnt want to be the focus of a legal system that would certainly be shook up by it, or because she didn’t want to be targeted by some violent fuckwit Trump supporter.

          But then I read the article and switched entirely. I wish I could remember the precise wording, but in effect she said that it had to be an established fact that he engaged in insurrection, and that it was not yet an established fact, and not within the bounds of this case to make that ruling. So I wrote my response.

          Then I got off the internet, gamed for a while, and went to bed.

          And woke up this morning to… this. And that’s unfortunately the extent of my knowledge on the matter.

          Was I confused? Maybe, but I tend not to think so, not (just) because my ego prefers that view, but because what I read was sufficient to make my own view do a 180.

          But if that bit about established fact really was there, where did it go? And why? And how is it not just gone, but nowhere else I’ve been able to find?

          Damned if I know…