On December 19, Colorado’s Supreme Court deemed former president Donald Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot. In a 4-3 ruling, the court held that Trump had engaged in “insurrection” and was therefore disqualified from returning to the presidency per the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection” clause.

Most opinion and analysis on this ruling (and other, similar cases working their way through other states’ court systems) revolves around particular questions:

Was the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot an insurrection?

If so, did Trump incite and/or support it? Did his attempts, outside the context of the riot, to invalidate the election results, constitute part of an insurrection scheme?

Is the president an “officer” “under” the United States as referred to in the insurrection clause?

Can state courts enforce that clause based on civil determinations of the answers to those questions, or is a criminal conviction and/or federal determination required?

Interesting questions indeed, and that they’re even under serious consideration seems to bolster the case that the United States may be headed for some kind of “national divorce” scenario, possibly entailing civil war.

I’ve got another question to add to the mix:

Did anyone really believe America’s “major parties” would never get around to using ballot access barriers against each other?

Those barriers began to go up in the 1890s with adoption of the “Australian ballot” — a uniform ballot printed by the government subdivision holding an election.

Prior to that, all votes were, essentially, “write-ins.” You hand-wrote your ballot, or dictated it to an election official with a witness if you couldn’t write, or cast a ballot printed by your political party or association of choice.

Once the government started printing   ballots, the government got to decide who could be ON those ballots. Ever since, the “major” parties have increasingly and enthusiastically abused that power with onerous signature requirements, filing fees, and other restrictions to ensure that only Republicans and Democrats have a very good shot at getting elected in most races.

Now Democrats and “never-Trump” Republicans want to use that same power to tell Americans — more than 74 million of whom voted for Trump in 2020 — that they’re not entitled to vote for their candidate of choice,  a former president and a “major” party front-runner.

And by the way, they’re doing it in the name of “protecting democracy.”

At some point,  a dialectical analysis might predict, “democracy” collapses under the weight of such internal contradictions.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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US Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) says he’s “angry, disappointed” at a staffer — make that former staffer — for producing video of the “adult” variety in his off hours. The Daily Caller released the video of a sexual encounter, apparently shot in a US Senate hearing room better known for judicial confirmation hearings, on December 15.

If the employer was anyone else and the workplace anywhere else, I guess I could sympathize with Cardin’s take on the incident as a “breach of trust.” In most cases, sex at the office is a bad idea and filming it is a worse one.

But the employer isn’t anyone else, and the workplace isn’t anywhere else. That staffer worked for an organization that spends every day enthusiastically doing to the American public what the staffer’s companion was doing to him (I’m sure you can figure that part out), and doing it in, among other places, that same hearing room.

The Capitol Hill complex would no doubt take first place in any ranking of America’s raunchiest BDSM clubs. It’s somewhat exclusive as far as formal membership goes (536 members), but boasts thousands of staff members to see to those members’ needs, and proudly televises many of its orgies. In fact, C-SPAN should strongly  consider adopting “A Subsidized OnlyFans for Masochists” as a tag line / branding play.

This incident may well constitute the first event in Hart 216’s history where only one person got screwed.

Unwise, immature, and inappropriate as it may have been, the whole thing didn’t rise to anywhere near the filth level embodied by Congress’s daily operations.

Remember, these are the people who seize one out of every four dollars you earn and blow the money on a never-ending bacchanal of global murder, domestic police statism, and corporate welfare.

Unfortunately, the media and public thirst for “scandal” tends more toward pearl-clutching over the peccadilloes of individuals who get caught while still low enough on the ladder to be thrown under the bus (sorry for the mixed metaphor there) than toward skeptical analysis of what our Very Special and Important rulers constantly attempt to sell as “legitimate” and “dignified” proceedings.

This story will likely enjoy a shorter shelf life than Bill Clinton’s  blue dress wardrobe malfunction or Eliot Spitzer’s escort service escapades (both among the least of those two’s sins). As it should. At least we didn’t have to see Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer naked.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“A Confederate memorial is to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia in the coming days,” the Associated Press reports, as “part of the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military-related facilities.”

For years, I’ve been of two minds about the movement to remove these memorials.

On one hand, I generally object to the idea of “government property” being used for such purposes. In fact, I object to the very idea of “government property,” but if there’s going to be such a property claim I want its allowable uses and purposes to a least be very narrowly defined. So yeah, take down the memorials — all of them, not just the Confederate ones.

On the other hand, I’m a fan of history, and the memorials in question illustrate the history of (and the history following) America’s single greatest and most violent convulsion, a “Civil War” resulting in several hundred thousand deaths.

Arlington National Cemetery is part of that history. It’s situated on land confiscated from Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and several hundred Confederates lie among the Civil War dead buried there.

While the 1914 monument erected to those Confederates bears certain features the present generation may find offensive (e.g. a slave following his “owner” to war), it also bears the inscription “they have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” It is, in fact, a monument to reunification, not division, and to peace, not war. What’s not to like about that?

What was the Union premise for the war? That the United States was “one nation, indivisible.”

If that premise is correct (I don’t believe it is, but IF), then the Confederate dead are American dead, and precisely as entitled to  American honors and memorials as the Union dead.

During the Mexican War, later Union general and US president Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his fiancee: “If we have to fight, I would like to do it all at once and then make friends.”

The post-war era didn’t really accomplish that. After “Reconstruction,” the south largely recreated the former slave system in all but name, leaving its demolition to the civil rights movement of a century later, and to this very day, southern “Lost Cause” revisionists and revanchists keep the flames of Confederate sympathies burning.

But the Union, not the Confederacy, won that war — a war it fought on and for the premise of a single America including the former Confederacy and former Confederates.

Desecrating the graves of the Confederate dead, denying them commemoration on land seized from their most esteemed commander, sends exactly the opposite message. It’s an attempt to preserve, not end, the divisions the war was all about.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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