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.

Matt Taibbi, who is not a conservative:

“Tom, I’ll start with you,” began Mika Brzezinski. “Why are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?”

Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.

White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading,is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America. …

The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.

Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times spent the last year telling “ignorant” Middle America its negative feelings about the economy are “demonstrably false,” because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, “Bidenomics is still working very well.” When White Rural Rage came out this week he rushed to review it, the intransigent refusal of yokels to accept his wisdom being his favored current hobby horse. “The Mystery of Rural White Rage” is remarkable on multiple levels, one being that after spending so much energy talking about the health of the economy, he pulls out an economic version of Sam Kinison’s classic “Move to the Food!” routine:

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers. Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are?

He answers his question: “Some cities have become unaffordable… and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.”

To recap: globalization and technological change have devastated small towns and made the urban keyboard warriors richer, and rural voters can’t move to the cities because they can’t afford to. However, instead of being grateful for the “huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia” in the form of federal programs paid by the taxes of luckier citizens like Krugman, small town America is unaccountably hostile.

Schaller and White Rural Rage co-author Paul Waldman make the same point, that “cities produce far more of the nation’s wealth,” and rural citizens are increasingly “subsidized by the taxes paid by higher-income metropolitans.” What gives? Why won’t they shut the fuck up?

“For so long,” complained Waldman on Morning Joe, “Democrats have been told… that in order to get rural voters… you have to go there… you have to show them that you understand… You have to put on a Carhartt jacket and go down to somebody’s farm, right? Maybe milk a cow?”

“Yes!” exclaimed* Mika.

But it turns out, a sad Waldman pronounced, that you “don’t have to do any of that,” because Donald Trump didn’t. He just “gave [rural voters] a way to essentially give a big middle finger to Democrats, to people who live in cities and to the rest of the country.”

The Morning Joe set looked perplexed. Why would that work better than wearing a Carhartt jacket and milking a cow? It didn’t make sense.

Educated America. We’re in good hands!

*The correct phrase is really “‘Yes,’ dipshitted Mika,” but I was afraid the usage would throw off some readers. For future reference, it may come up again.

More on this later.