Knocking Trump off the ballot won't save democracy. But it probably won't hurt, either.
Stop the bleeding before you save the patient.
As you probably know by now, the Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Donald Trump cannot appear on that state’s presidential primary ballot — determining he had run afoul of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that makes officials who have engaged in insurrection ineligible for office.
A lot of smart people hate this.
To deny the voters the chance to elect the candidate of their choice is a Rubicon-crossing event for the judiciary. It would be seen forever by tens of millions of Americans as a negation of democracy. It is not enough that their belief is plausibly wrong or likely wrong. It must be incontrovertibly wrong to support such a momentous step.
I suspect the Supreme Court – which is more a political body than a legal body in major issues like this – will blanche at taking such a step, and I think that judgment would be correct.
And here’s my former colleague Damon Linker:
These three folks, I think, all qualify as anti-Trump centrists — Chait representing the leftmost wing of the group and McArdle the right. So this is not a case of them defending Trump.
Instead, the idea they share is that Donald Trump is a political problem — millions of voters love the former president and want to vote for him again — and the most legitimate, least dangerous way of neutralizing the problem. Using the law against him (as McArdle suggests) might actually create a bigger problem.
They’re probably right.
But they’re also a little bit wrong.
Here’s a clunky metaphor: You have a patient whose body is riddled with cancer. Treating them, saving their life, will be a long and arduous and expensive process. But also: The patient has a gaping stomach wound that is bleeding out and if you don’t stop that bleeding, they will die right here and now on the spot. You don’t say: “We can’t treat the wound because the bigger and broader problem is the cancer.” You stop the bleeding, then turn your attention to the bigger and broader problem.
In case it isn’t obvious: Donald Trump is the gaping, bleeding wound in this metaphor.
And folks, we’ve got to stop the bleeding.
Fixing the Trump problem won’t solve our democracy problem. Too much has happened. But fixing our Trump problem would fix our Trump problem and right now Trump is the most pressing and acute threat to democracy.
The courts seem best positioned — if they choose to accept the role1 — of addressing that problem.
Let me be clear: I wouldn’t want the courts to intervene against Trump unless he’d done something actually, plainly illegal. Your mileage may vary — and I’m no lawyer, so I’m not going to argue the details — but it seems pretty clear to me that threshold has been met. Did Trump engage in insurrection? Seems like a pretty clear “yes” to me!
So let the courts play their role.
I recognize there’s possibly a “burning the village to save it” quality to my logic here. Because the anti-Trump centrists are right: Court intervention really might exacerbate the American crisis of democracy. But it also seems to me that horse is out of the barn: We have a crisis no matter what. Absent a mass conversion by millions of Trump voters — and a lot of his more violent supporters — there is not a good way through this moment. The courts can’t save us. But maybe, maybe they can give us a bit of breathing room. God help us all.
We’ll see what the U.S. Supreme Court decides to do with all of this.
FWIW, libertarianish conservatives David French, Walter Olson, and Ilya Somin think the Colorado supremes got it right.
Knocking Trump off the ballot would be a good step to protecting democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. If it happens, there’s a good chance that Nicki Haley becomes president. I don’t want her to be president, but if she is elected, I’m confident that we will also have presidential elections in 2028 and 2032. Neither Haley or DeSantas can play reality TV dictator the way Trump can. Electing Haley in 2024 won’t do anything to solve the oligarchy and wealth inequality problems in the US, but that is a very long term effort.