Jeff Childers:

The Supreme Court giveth, and the Supreme Court taketh away. First, the giveth. And it was a big one. Bloomberg ran its report under the headline, “Supreme Court Buries Democrats’ Fantasy of Keeping Trump Off the Ballot.”  As you have probably already heard echoing across America’s digital fields and electronic byways, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday as many of us had predicted, in a sweeping 9-0 decision in favor of President Trump.

As a result, he stays on the ballot in Colorado. And, because of a courageous 6-3 twist in the decision by the conservative justices, Trump also stays on ballots in all the other blue states drafting in Colorado’s steaming, radioactive wake. But I’ll get to that later.

The decision wasn’t complicated. I’ll quickly summarize how we got here, for people who live in Portland. Four Republican voters and two Democrats sued Colorado’s Secretary of State last year arguing Trump was an oathbreaking insurrectionist and, under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, could not hold “an office of the United States.”

After a kangaroo show trial, and an appeal, Colorado’s Supreme Court put down their crayons and ruled 4-3 — in napalm — that the Constitution prohibits oathbreaking insurrectionists like Trump from being President. The decision electrified the chronically-unhappy anti-Trump world. Eureka! they cried. It’s so simple! they shouted, in manifest joy and delirious delight.

We must save democracy by giving courts power to keep Republicans off the ballot in the first place.

Corporate media rallied, trotting out herds of constitutional “experts” sagely opining about the Framers’ wisdom in excluding oathbreaking insurrectionists and blah blah blah. But there was a problem.

The problem was, the particular dusty, archaic Constitutional provision was part of the Fourteenth Amendment — one of the two anti-slavery amendments added after the Civil War. It was designed solely to stop pro-slavery Democrats from marching back into Reconstruction-era state governments.

No way did the drafters — having just won the bloodiest war in American history or in its future the hard way —  no way did they intend to hand a heckler’s veto over future American Presidents to disgruntled Southern States still bristling with unsurrendered Klansmen and brimming with defiant Johnny Rebs burning to snatch up muskets.

The Court agreed. It uncontroversially ruled that “States may disqualify persons” from state offices, but any power over federal offices must be explicitly granted by Congress. Hinting at the decision’s originalist underpinnings, the Court quoted an 1858 commentary on the Constitution:

Because federal officers “owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not of a portion, of the people,” powers over their election and qualifications must be specifically “dele- gated to, rather than reserved by, the States.”

In other words, Colorado does not get to veto a Presidential candidate just because it didn’t wear its Hillary mask and caught Trump Derangement Syndrome.

This result may have been obvious to me and other thoughtful Constitutional scholars. And it was obvious to the United States Supreme Court — including its far-left members. But it was not obvious to Colorado’s Supreme Court or to squadrons of blabbering morons trotted out by corporate media who are now all losing their ever-loving minds to save their tattered reputations.

One of those blabbering morons was David French, who — like a defiant Johnny Reb of old — refused to admit he was wrong and promptly published a defiant op-ed in the New York Times …

The Nation’s leftist legal correspondent, Elie Mystal, was so mad he even called for the Supreme Court to be abolished. …

Mystal’s deranged screed was particularly amusing in its inherent contradiction: the whole case was about giving the courts more power, but now they suddenly want to take power away from courts? It would be confusing except I’ve learned not to expect them to make sense.

NewsBusters rounded up a series of crazy liberal reactions, who generally agreed that yesterday was a dark day for ‘democracy’ …

I could go on, there is certainly a Schadenfreude-y delight to it, but time presses and you can find more for yourself if you like.

Some people just can’t admit when they are wrong, what else can I tell you? Why anyone listens to them at all is the real mystery.

I mentioned the twist, the conservative justices’ brave 6-3 ruling. The three liberal justices — Sotomayor, Sagan, and Jackson — joined the 9-0 verdict but not its reasoning. So they wrote their own separate opinion.

Specifically, the liberal Justices disagreed with the majority’s decision that no state can disqualify Trump. They would have avoided interpreting the Constitutional issue altogether, and would have ruled that only Colorado was barred from disqualifying Trump:

Although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision. Because we would decide only the issue before us, we concur only in the judgment.

In other words, the majority’s ruling deleted all the other efforts to bar Trump from ballots in all the other states, not just Colorado. That may seem sensible to you, but it didn’t make sense to the liberal Justices.