American minefield

Created
Fri, 17/11/2023 - 02:30
Updated
Fri, 17/11/2023 - 02:30
Tread carefully or go for it? Pick your metaphor. Whistling past a graveyard. Tiptoeing through a minefield. Every day feels like the country is doing a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. And we know what happened to them. The question of Donald Trump’s qualification for any elected office is a hot potato neither the courts nor election officials nor Congress want to touch. Hayes Brown writes: Efforts to block former President Donald Trump from being on the ballot next year have yet to score a major win in court. Nobody in power seems willing to decide whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause disqualifies him from returning to the White House. Instead, judges and state officials have either pawned off that decision to someone else or determined that there will be some other, better time to make a judgment. The result is a rapidly shrinking window for that decision to be made. And, based on the standard in a ruling issued in Michigan on Tuesday, we might not know the answer until after all the votes have been cast on Election Day next year. It might be after the presidential electors have met and submitted their ballots. It might come down to Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, to decide whether Trump is even eligible to become president. Earlier this year, legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, came out in support of the idea that Trump is constitutionally ineligible for office and that it fell to election officials to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. (That section bars from federal…