The USSC just gutted the insurrection clause of the US Constitution

AMENDMENT XIV, Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

A unanimous USSC opinion says that congress gets to decide who is an insurrectionist and who isn’t. In essence, that holding kills and buries the insurrection clause. What DJT did on 1/6/21 is now formally and practically sanctioned as legal. We are well past the days of a reasonably functioning, bipartisan congress and the USSC knows it. 

Scotusblog comments:

Before disqualifying someone under Section 3, the justices observed, there must be a determination that the provision actually applies to that person. And Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives the power to make that determination to Congress, by authorizing it to pass “appropriate legislation” to “enforce” the 14th Amendment. Nothing in the 14th Amendment, the court stressed, gives states the power to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office, nor was there any history of states doing so in the years after the amendment was ratified.

Allowing states to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office could create a variety of problems. First, although Section 5 requires Congress to tailor any legislation that it enacts to implement Section 3 so that it specifically targets the conduct that Section 3 was adopted to prevent, state efforts to enforce Section 3 would not face this same limitation. “But the notion that the Constitution grants the States freer rein than Congress to decide how Section 3 should be enforced with respect to federal offices is simply implausible,” the court concluded.

In a relatively rare move, justice Barrett appeared to criticize the tone of the joint opinion filed by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, asserting that “this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

In their six-page joint opinion, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson agreed with the result that the per curiam opinion reached – that Colorado cannot disqualify Trump – but not its reasoning. The three justices acknowledged that permitting Colorado to remove Trump from the ballot “would … create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork.”

But the majority should not, in their view, have gone on to decide who can enforce Section 3 and how. Nothing in Section 3 indicates that it must be enforced through legislation enacted by Congress pursuant to Section 5, they contended. And by resolving “many unsettled questions about Section 3,” the three justices complained, “the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President.”

Before this, I thought that the USSC was tipping in favor of corrupt, bigoted Christian theocracy and corrupt plutocracy over corrupt dictatorship. In view of this decision, I am unsure of what kind of corrupt authoritarianism the USSC favors. It is clearly anti-democracy, anti-elections, anti-civil liberties and definitely pro-corruption and authoritarianism. But beyond that I am just confused. 

Supporting all three kinds of corrupt tyranny at the same time seems to me to be untenable and something that could spin out of control. For example, if DJT gets re-elected, he will try for full-blown dictatorship with martial law and lots of repression. He could easily turn that sentiment against the theocrats and plutocrats, in a way akin to what the corrupt dictators who run China have done or what Putin has done to Russia.  

For clarity, Christianity in America can be brought under the control of a brutal dictator like DJT wants to be.

Of course, DJT would need to be careful and thoughtful about whacking Christian elites to bring them to heel. There could be a major backlash among the clueless rank & file. And, DJT is not a careful or a thoughtful person. He is much more like an enraged, unthinking wild animal with sharp claws and fangs. He does not do nuance or shades of gray. He lightheartedly does blunderbuss and enthusiastically exerts blind, raw power for self-gain.

We live in interesting times.

. . . . and like an adult’s nightmare!