Donald Trump has a spectacular gift for putting his allies in difficult — if not impossible — positions.
Again and again, he has placed the people who wish to stand beside him in spots where they must choose between protecting him and his interests or preserving something they hold dear.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruling that, if it stands, will remove him from the ballot is just the latest example.
Trump and his unquestioning followers depict the lawsuits challenging the former president’s eligibility to seek the White House again as some liberal plot. They say it’s just one more attempt by Democrats to destroy the man they fear the most.
It isn’t.
In the first place, thinking Democrats pray Trump is the Republican nominee for president. No one in their own party unifies its own constituencies the way that Trump does.
At present, most polls show Trump running neck-and-neck with President Joe Biden. Some show Trump with slight leads, particularly in battleground states.
Dig a little deeper into the data, though, and one finds that crucial elements of Trump’s support melt away if he’s convicted on any of the 91 criminal charges he faces, putting Biden back in the lead.
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, on the other hand, leads Biden by double digits in several polls. If she is the GOP candidate, the suburban female voters who fled the Republican Party by the hundreds of thousands during the Trump years come back home, and Democrats face the prospect of losing the presidency, the U.S. Senate, and seeing Republicans expand their slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
No, Democrats need Trump. Without him, they would go back to squabbling amongst themselves — and getting their butts kicked at the ballot box.
That’s why they weren’t the architects of the litigation that challenged Trump’s eligibility. No, the masterminds of the effort are two conservative law professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — who are active members of the Federalist Society.
The Federalist Society is the conservative legal group that nurtured Trump’s three nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. The group has been the source of most rightwing legal thought for the past couple of generations.
The bedrock upon which the Federalist Society built itself was a supposed and loudly stated faith in constitutional “original intent.” That original intent should be determined, Federalist Society devotees insist, by close reading of the plain text of the Constitution.
The plain text of the third section of the 14th Amendment reads:
“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.”
It is almost as if it were written with Donald Trump and Jan. 6, 2021, in mind.
Therein lies the problem for Trump’s allies on the U.S. Supreme Court and elsewhere.
They can preserve his eligibility to run for president by overruling the Colorado Supreme Court decision.
The cost of doing that would be twofold.
First, it will strip that section of the Constitution of any meaning. That will mean that, if Joe Biden or any future president wishes to deny or overturn the results of an election that doesn’t go as the incumbent wishes, the Supreme Court will have said that’s okay.
But the larger cost for the Federalist Society members on the high bench is that such a decision will make clear that their devotion to the idea of original intent and plain-text readings was a sham all along.
They will undermine not just the legitimacy of the Supreme Court but their entire intellectual movement.
This is why, while it may be inconvenient at times to be one of Donald Trump’s opponents, it’s downright dangerous to be one of his friends.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
