16 Comments

If SCOTUS reverses the Colorado Supreme Court saying that states can’t independently disqualify presidential candidates under Section 3 - then what would be the criteria for a state to disqualify a presidential candidate? Or is that one of the thorny bits a narrow ruling would sidestep?

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Is there a compelling reason for the Chief to ask for a response from the government if the Court members intend to deny cert? I guess I'm asking if, on the shadow docket, a response is always requested. Thanks!

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The more apropos maxim in this case might be "Equity aids the vigilant" (Re: “[h]e who comes into equity must come with clean hands.”)

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Does summary disposition normally require 6 votes?

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If anyone ever wondered - why did English burned dissidents in Henry VIII and Bloody Mary times -

usually after long judicial procedures, and speeches, and arguments, and counter arguments - “I die King’s faithful servant but God’s first” - et cetera - this piece demonstrates what must be a British particularity - high minded litigiousness for political purposes, kind of a national sport.

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Steve, I finally got it!

Colorado has no jurisdiction over presidential candidacy. No state has.

States may neither register candidates nor prepare electors’ ballots for these offices. Article II s1 mandates that either the presidential or the vice presidential candidate voted for must reside in another state than the elector’s own. This bars individual state requirements for candidates in case no candidate for either office residing in another state qualifies. Electors' ballots must be blank.

The electors are expressly vested with power to elect the president and vice president, excluding the state’s voters. No state’s popular ballot may list candidates for president or vice president, so Colorado's interest in its ballots is not relevant.

Read 'em and weep, everybody.

I love being me.

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A great pleasure to read the inside the baseball on the procedural paths. There is nothing about the law that is so much missed outside our calling is that "the substance of the law hides in the interstices of procedure."

My far less informed bet is that SCOTUS sees addressing the merits is a no brainer hard no. There is not conceivable reason to take up the invitation for the opportunity of further adorning the panel's opinion. Even if somehow one could be summoned from the vasty deep for the sake of "the next time," SCOTUS has a long history of judicial economy disfavoring of deciding anything that doesn't.

Picking it up for the purpose of reversing is and out-and-out institutional death wish. A Trump II administration will consider itself free of constraint by anything Article III courts have or ever will done. No institution acts to eliminate its own power. Just. Can't. See. It.

That leaves picking it up to correct some collateral defect. I imagine in a law school hypo way, that gangs of law clerks are having rumbles over Midland Asphalt and to keep the peace, the Court reluctantly agrees to settle the controversy.

But really on the last? I've gone overboard.

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