Tag: bellows

The Discomfort of Undue Process

Ken Grossberger, PhD

What if George Santos is found not guilty?  What if Donald Trump is?  What if Hunter Biden is? What if Joe Biden gets indicted? The rush to judgment may satisfy emotionally, but due process gets trampled along the way.

Congress may have acted prematurely in the George Santos case. The press, and the people, may have prejudged Trump and anyone named Biden (depending on one’s predilections), in advance of any jury verdict.  This is fine for a discussion at the bar at midnight, terrible for any appreciation of due process. The lesson here is that preemption may be prematurity.  Expelling Santos from Congress and removing Trump from the ballot may be politically palatable to some but is also legally foundationless. The political strategies of ballot denial and power maintenance are also ethically dubious at best. The US Constitution requires due process to protect each individual’s rights, and even though in some venues due process does not apply in fact, it should apply in principle.

The most egregious example is in Maine, where Secretary of State Shenna Bellows unilaterally removed former President Trump from the primary ballot.  Her argument was that Trump was guilty of inciting an insurrection on January 6, thus she was compelled under section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the constitution to rule that Trump could not run for political office.  Access to the ballot, therefore, is left to the constitutional interpretations of hundreds of unelected state administrative officials, a precedent under which democracy, as we know it, would disintegrate.

In Colorado the state supreme court also removed Trump from the ballot under the same logic.  Here we have at least some semblance of jurisprudence, with a court of law involved. However, we also have the legal conundrum as to the intent of section 3 as Congress intended it in 1868.  After the Civil War, Congress was left with the problem of over 5 million people who were still slaves in the south.  Thus the legislature passed the 13th amendment to free them, the 14th amendment to provide them citizenship and the 15th amendment to give former slaves the vote.  The insurrection in question was half the country seceding and fighting a major war of separation from the federal government.  Almost a million Americans lost their lives as hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides fought a desperate war in this rebellion.  The superannuated but highly embarrassing January 6 frat party was incredibly wrong and damaging to the American psyche, but hardly an insurrection.  

So, those who graduated from the Google School of Law, and some misguided courts, would have us believe that cherry-picking one’s way through the constitution to find a word or phrase that seemed to justify one’s preconceived conclusion is justified, due process notwithstanding.  Removing Trump from the ballot, ipso fact, is supported by the 14th amendment.

Thus we would be left whims of the perpetually upset never-Trump neurotics, or their counter-parts on the Right, to determine whom they would allow to run for office.  Elections would become free-for-alls with competing jurisdictions summarily removing from the ballot candidates of the opposing parties only to suffer retaliation in turn, and then perhaps no one is left on any ballot.  Court cases would pile up and the entire electoral system would be permanently constipated.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” as we hear so often, and maybe this year it actually is.

Shenna Bellows – What is She Running For?

Ken Grossberger, PhD

In this era of Trump ballot denial Maine Secretary of State Shena Bellows’ decision to eliminate Donald Trump from her state’s election is the latest example of trashing democracy in the name of democracy. She tortured the dots from the 14th amendment to Trump in a self-aggrandizing attempt to convince the political world that she actually has a point. But in the end, she mangles the meaning of the US constitution and denies the voters any say in an election designed by law to provide such voting privileges.

This is that latest attempt by the left to reinterpret the 14th amendment into something other than what was intended. At issue here is Section 3 which reads, in part, that no one who holds an office having sworn an oath to the “support the constitution……shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” constitution. The 14th amendment was ratified in 1868 and was clearly designed by Congress to prevent former Confederate army veterans from holding office. Also at issue is the definition of insurrection and rebellion, which has nothing to do with Donald Trump on the infamous day of January 6, 2021. Even more ludicrous is that Trump was actually in office at the time, so the logic of the left is that Trump was conducting an insurrection against himself. The superannuated frat party of misfits that invaded the capitol that day deserve to be punished for breaking the law. They also severely embarrassed the country. Trump certainly could have done much more to stop the mob, and he did not. But this was not an armed rebellion, even though here are those on the left who are quick to point out that some of the capital transgressors had weapons. How does this one-day mess, as bad as it was, rise to the level of an insurrection on the level of the US Civil War where hundreds of thousands fought against the government and almost a million Americans died? Only in this age of extreme polarization can anyone this side of sanity suggest that January 6 was an attempt to overthrow the government that Donald Trump himself was the chief executive of.

But that was not Ms. Bellows primary motivation. She is currently the Secretary of State of Maine. She previously was a state senator. She also ran for the US Senate against Susan Collins and lost. So, stealing a play from Trump’s playbook, she makes a screwy decision to remove Trump from the ballot in Maine, not as the result of a deep-thinking process as to the legal issues at hand, but to deal herself into the big game, to grab the spotlight, to set herself up for the next office she may target.  

Her political claim to fame is that she is a Biden sycophant, and now a lefty seeking higher ground. The two for one play is that she might actually believe she could keep Trump off the ballot at the same time, yet another paranoid Democrat seeking Trump inoculation. But if she actually succeeds, she would open something much worse than anything Pandora had in her bag of tricks. Consider the environment where administrative officers across the country decided who could, and who could not, have ballot access based on their perception of a criminal act. Also consider that usually most states have Republican governments. Game-set-match, the end of the Democratic party on most local levels in the US. Does future candidate Bellows really suggest we have a country where we replace legal guilt (determined by a jury) with some notion of administrative guilt determined by bureaucrats? Even though the left quickly points out that their now favorite clause of their now favorite amendment does not specifically state that a legal conviction is necessary, are they actually promulgating a government where the right to run for office hinges on the constitutional interpretations of unelected administrators?

Not quite what she may argue, but apparently, what she wants is controversy, and above all, attention. In a Trumpian way she seeks to command the notice of the media and make herself the center of the circus. But she is guilty of what Yuval Levin calls a “dereliction of responsibility” and the attempted “corruption of political culture.” By no means does this excuse the behavior of Donald Trump. He engages in what Mr. Levin labels “thuggish narcissism.” But this does not disqualify him from any ballot, and the US Supreme Court will undoubtedly make quick work of Ms. Bellows’ stunt, as well as the misguided attempt by other states to bury democracy in the darkness of gerrymandered jurisprudence.