Is it me or do folks here seem somewhat ranty of late?

[Ocelot II]

37. Yes, we accept what we want to believe.

The theory proposed by Luttig, Tribe, et al. - that 14/3 is self-executing - was persuasive as a theory, and the scholars loved it because they thought it would appeal to the originalists. The problem that I always saw with it is that there was no mechanism in 14/3 itself or in any of its subsequent applications that explained how it could be applied in a national election. Once lawsuits were filed in different states with differing election laws I became pretty sure that Anderson would a loser at SCOTUS - not because a majority of the justices are conservative but because there was no way to uphold it without throwing yet another very large spanner in the works of a national election where there were already plenty of spanners being thrown. You could argue (correctly, I think) that Dobbs also disregarded the chaos likely to result - and that did result - from throwing abortion regulation back to the states. A lot of people complained that in deciding Dobbs SCOTUS' majority stuck to a constrained originalist approach and ignored the practical effects of its decision. But now do we want SCOTUS to go all originalist and ignore the practical effects of a decision that either applies Anderson to all states, ignoring the election laws the Constitution delegates to the states, or else that holds that each state could decide for itself whether an insurrection had occurred and whether the candidate did it, leaving those states to apply different standards and allow that decision to be made in some cases by a single official? One thing that particularly bothers me is the possibility that the GOP would weaponize 14/3 and use it to remove Democrats from ballots using specious claims that they fomented insurrections, just as they have been doing with the impeachment process. If Anderson is upheld I can easily imagine some nutball GOP secretary of state in a GOP-controlled swing state waiting until just before general election ballots are printed to decide that Biden had committed insurrection because of some damn thing they made up. Be careful what you ask for, I guess. But all the geschrei about this being yet another example of SCOTUS being a bunch of fascists in Trump's pocket is mistaken, at least in this case. I don't think the liberal judges will vote to affirm, either.